


Logos

by BreezyWheeze



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 14:09:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11315004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BreezyWheeze/pseuds/BreezyWheeze
Summary: In a world without magic, a girl who loves books has to find a way to use her power to be the hero Brockton Bay needs. Taylor finds she can summon magical objects from books she reads. Those objects provide fearsome powers, but there may be a cost. (Taylor alt!power in Brockton Bay, hooks up with a cast of OC's instead of the Wards or Undersiders).





	1. Chapter 1

A/N:

Two of my favorite ideas in Worm fanfic are the Libriomancer!Taylor stories and the Ringmaker. They’re great and you should absolutely read them here:

Book Worm: <https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/bookworm-worm-libriomancer.287867/>

Ouroboros: <https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ouroboros-worm.325319/>

The Ringmaker: <https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ring-maker-worm-lord-of-the-rings-alt-power.517894/>

I’m shamelessly stealing a bunch of these ideas and bashing them together into an AU.

**Basic Premise (you can skip this, covered at the start of the story itself)**

[spoiler]Magic was real on Earth but faded as science took over. The belief that fuels magic was channeled into books and science but nobody could tap into it. Taylor was the first person ever born with the mage ability to tap into the magic in books. It’s not a shard-based power. I’m stealing the basic premise from Ouroboros and Book Worm, which are based on The Libriomancer. I haven’t read Libriomancer and am tweaking the power mechanics. The power is still ludicrously OP (I’m an unabashed fan of OP powers) but I’m toning it down slightly so Taylor doesn’t turn into a literal God in her first two weeks of having her power.

If anything is wrong either from Libriomancer canon or from how the magical artifact in question functions in the book it comes from, I’m gonna hand-wave that away as “well Taylor’s power _thinks_ that’s how it works, so that’s what it does.”

If anything in what follows is wrong from Worm canon, it was probably a mistake but I’m just gonna lie and say it was an intentional AU element.

Story starts at the locker (a thousand apologies) and has Taylor surrounded by the standard Brockton Bay crap (Lung, Bakuda, et. al.) but she hooks up with a group of OC’s instead of the Undersiders or Wards. Many things go better than canon, some go worse, and being Taylor is suffering.[/spoiler]

**Rules of Libriomancy that Taylor’s Figured Out By the End of Book 1 (covered in-story, spoilers)**

[spoiler]

  * Books that have the potential to produce an item give off a slight humming and light. It’s not literal, but your power can sense it.
  * Novels work, non-fiction doesn’t. Comic books don’t work. E-books don’t work. Really just novels.
  * After successfully pulling an item, it takes about a week to recharge the power to pull another item.
  * The item to be pulled must fit through a portal the size of the book itself, opened to the middle of the book.
  * You can't just make the book bigger. It’s gotta be a normal book that people have read.
  * You can only draw one item out of a book. Attempting to draw the item out burns the book, metaphorically. It’s visible that a book has been used up – even if you go to the store and pick up a different copy of the book, the power shows that the book is tapped out. Taylor hasn’t found a way to replenish a book’s energy.
  * Using different editions, translations, or languages doesn’t work. After pulling out Bilbo’s sword from The Hobbit, every version, edition, and variation on The Hobbit has been burned.
  * The book’s energy gets burned even if the attempt to draw out an item fizzles. Drawing something that can’t fit through fizzles. Grabbing at an item before it’s done emerging makes it fizzle.
  * More popular books glow more strongly and feel easier to pull things from.
  * You shouldn’t pull out anything with a mind. Bad news. Insanity ensues.
  * The things pulled out are very much like they’re literally described in the book. So pulling out Harry’s acceptance letter to Hogwart’s did nothing, it was just a letter. Similarly, pulling out Harry’s wand just gave you a very nice stick. It wasn’t the letter or wand that made Harry a wizard so pulling them out did nothing for you.



[/spoiler]

**Additional Notes on Taylor’s Powers (spoilers, answers questions but probably wait till you’ve caught up with the story)**

[spoiler]

Through the first book, Taylor is still learning her power, so the “rules” for how her power works may change over time. Her limitations to once-a-week, only novels, being unable to return the item to the book to refresh the book, etc. are entirely possible to overcome.

Taylor’s power depends not only on how widespread and enduring the books are, but also her own personal investment in them. So she hasn’t read and doesn’t care about 50 Shades of Grey meaning even its insane popularity wouldn’t let her easily pull something like The One Ring out of it. By contrast, Taylor is deeply attached to The Hobbit, and its popularity is both huge and enduring. So even as a novice she was able to pull out the ludicrously powerful One Ring.

No, I won’t comment at all on the fact that a girl who grew up with a literature professor for a Mom seems to think The Bible is a novel.

Belief and its magic power do linger. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs novels like Tarzan or Barsoom would still be pretty powerful given how hugely popular they were back in their day. The exact duration of such persistence and current strength level would depend on how popular the books were at the time and how strongly Taylor is attached to them.

Any mind at all – animal, human, AI, virtual intelligence – is going to be irreparably driven insane by being pulled from a book. Plants, seeds, etc. are fine but any animal (even an egg) or machine that simulates or expresses intelligent behavior ain’t gonna make it.

I’m not going to worry about the limitation from The Libriomancer that’s something like “you can do magic or you can be magic but not both.” That is, the Libriomancer has the limitation that if Taylor turned herself into a vampire or werewolf or other magical being then she’d lose access to her Libriomancy power. I’m ignoring that. For the way Taylor’s power works here, I don’t really see that it matters whether she’s using wearable items to enhance herself or uses an item that transforms some or all of her body into something powered. Plus I really wanted to make her an allomancer. However, a limitation that Taylor will absolutely have to worry about (although she doesn’t realize it yet) is the insanity. Pulling too many powerful items or items that are individually too powerful will push her further and further into madness.

As I’m sure someone will ask: yes it is entirely possible for Contessa to: “path to writing a novel that includes a small item capable of being wielded by Taylor and destroying Scion while preserving human life across the multiverse, and then getting that novel published and made insanely popular so it has enough power to let Taylor pull the requisite item.” The question is whether she ever would. As I recall from canon, it wasn’t recognized that Foil’s power was the god-killer they were looking for until very near the end (Cauldron isn’t so all-knowing or powerful as Contessa’s power might make them seem), at which point the path in question would be useless. Can’t “path to bestselling novel” when the universe is bare weeks or months away from GM.

Magic as it existed in Earth’s past and now exists through Taylor is unknown to Scion/Eden/Abaddon although other Entities may have encountered magic-wielding species before. Since canon seems to want to take a purely science/tech approach to Entities and parahuman powers, I’m interpreting that to mean that the Entities affecting Earth Bet have never encountered magic or swapped shards with Entities that have encountered magic.

An example on how magic would interact with shard powers: Tattletale could read Taylor reasonably well, since Tattletale takes perceivable clues and makes ultra-hyper-quick deductions with some imperceptible shard bullshit thrown on top. So while Tt’s shard has no idea how The One Ring works, she can figure out “the person in front of me believes she can turn invisible instantly upon putting a ring on” based on some sort of micro-movements in Taylor’s posture and hands.

By contrast, if Contessa tries to make a Path that involves Taylor’s behavior, her Path is going to assume that Taylor is an unpowered teenage girl. The Path can’t perceive magical powers, and any cause-and-effect it tries to precog will get thrown off the instant that Taylor does something or reacts in a way that _isn’t_ what an unpowered teenage girl would do. So basically instantly. Having said that, if Taylor were ever to get nice and cozy with Contessa and explain exactly how her power works and how all her artifacts work, then Contessa could certainly create a Path using the same “model of the person” workaround that she does for Eidolon (“Path to helping defeat the S9 working in conjunction with a teenage girl who has access to tinkertech that does X, Y, Z, and who has the power to create additional items based on a powerset with the following rules…”)

[/spoiler]

 

** Logos **

 

**Book 1 – Chapter 1**

The Age of Enlightenment was fundamentally one of loss. Loss of magic. Loss of belief. Loss of humanity’s access to the arcane paths of eldritch energies. But magic is a funny thing. It’s not a part of science yet it still obeys something like science’s conservation laws that govern its mundane siblings, matter and energy. As mankind’s focus and belief shifted from shamans and witches into books and science, books themselves began building up reserves of magical power.

Fiction was a much more willing host than non-fiction, and a mere 559 years after Gutenberg crafted his little press, a human was born with the ability to access magic once again.

She came into a world of conflict, fraying at the seams under the stress of human pettiness amplified by inhuman power. Like all magic-users before her, her powers came slowly. First, she was little more than a precocious child with an unusually strong love of books. Her powers grew into allowing her to read vastly more quickly than normal, but balanced this with a tendency to get lost in words. While she could finish a novel in just an hour or two, her tendency to stop and daydream about the book turned the consumption of a story into an affair lasting two or three times as long.

Magic’s conservation meant that with only a single outlet in all the world, with only a single wielder tapping the enormous well that was five centuries of stoppered belief, our potential mage’s potential was that of a god. Pity that she’d need it.

Vision quests, hallucinogen-fueled trips, self-flagellation, alcohol-fueled whirling and the like all developed as ways to provide the short, sharp shock needed to fully awaken magic-users to the world beyond the mundane and to bring them into their ability. Brockton Bay in the year 2011 was notably short on these sorts of self-aware and relatively benign methods. What it was not short on, however, was man’s inhumanity to man.

=

**Wed 1/5/11**

Confinement. Stench. Screaming.

…

Merciful oblivion.

=

**Mon 1/10/11**

I coughed.

My throat hurt.

I heard beeping. My eyes cracked open and were filled with harsh fluorescent light. Tilting my head up, my first sight was of Dad sitting in the corner of the room, folded up into an uncomfortable-looking chair. He was leaning forward, forearms resting on his legs, head hanging low, in that vaguely defecatory posture adopted by the defeated or shell-shocked. My cough caught his attention. He looked up, making eye contact with me.

In a flash, his eyes came alive and his face started to crease into a smile. In the months and years that followed, I’d be haunted by that first look – before he recognized that I was awake, he looked completely blank, empty. In that moment he wasn’t my Dad. He was a zombie without hope, love, or reason.

“Taylor,” he began, equal parts concern and happiness.

“Hey Dad,” I croaked out as he got up and walked over to the bedside.

I tried to focus on him but I was distracted by this faint, tinny ringing noise. It was coming from a little end-table that was next to the chair Dad had been sitting in. There wasn’t anything special about the table, just a squat hunk of poorly-crafted particleboard covered in old magazines and a copy of whatever book Dad had been reading. I put the noise out of my mind.

“How’re you doing, kiddo?”

“Thirsty.”

Several cups of room temperature tap water later, I felt like I could actually have a conversation.

I slowly put the plastic cup down next to me in the hospital bed. There was a long pause.

“What hap..” we both began at the same time.

Dad smiled as I quietly muttered “jinx” under my breath.

“Dad, why am I in the hospital?”

He paused. “Taylor, honey, what do you remember?”

I searched back. I could remember going back to school for the first day of the Spring semester. I remembered being worried because Emma and crew had been laying off before the Christmas break and some treasonous part of my brain insisted they were planning something. I seemed to recall something about an awful smell as I walked up to the locker, but as is ever the case with memories, the recollection of the smell was nothing compared to actual experience. Then nothing. Waking up here.

I said as much to Dad and he seemed sort of relieved.

“What actually happened to me?”

“Oh honey. For now it doesn’t matter. We can talk about it later but for now you’re awake and you’re healthy. You’ve been unconscious for the past four days. The doctors said it was a coma but that you had a good shot of coming out of it.”

That caught me up short. “A coma?” I asked, disbelieving.

“Yeah, but don’t worry about it, sweetie. The doc said it was just a technical definition and that you’d almost certainly wake up soon. And you did!” he added the last in this forced chipper tone.

“Uhhh… well, okay, I guess.” The ringing from the end table in the corner of the room had slowly gotten louder. Plus now it there was this vague shininess coming off Dad’s book that I’m sure wasn’t there before.

“Hey Dad, can you look over there,” I gestured towards the book. “Do you see anything strange?”

He looked towards the book and then whipped his head back to me. “Taylor, honey? What? What do you see?”

Shit.

It was just me then.

“Oh, nothing, I coulda sworn I saw a flash of light come off that book for a second. Must’ve been nothing. What were you reading?”

Dad didn’t seem impressed by my weak attempt at deflection. “Honey, we have to ask the doctor about seeing flashes of light. I don’t know much about brains or comas, but that can’t be a good sign. Oh, and I was reading the _Princess of Mars_ books.”

That got a weak smile from me. When grandpa was a kid his favorite books were those old-school sci-fi and fantasy pulp novels like Burroughs’s Mars or Tarzan books. Dad reread them sometimes, and it was a sign of how worried he’d been that he’d retreated into a comfort novel like that.

I spent the rest of the day with the doctors subjecting me to both CT scans and an MRI to make sure my brain was okay after waking from a coma and claiming to hallucinate a flash of light. I was otherwise in basically good health. I’d gotten some nasty cuts, scratches, bruises, and sprains (particularly my ankles) in the locker but nothing that wouldn’t heal. After keeping me an extra day for observation after I woke up, they discharged me. Dad kept dancing around the subject of what had happened, and we stuck to inconsequential topics.

=

**Tue 1/11/11**

We pulled into the driveway at casa Hebert. Dad’s old truck gave a few phlegmy coughs as he cut the ignition. I still felt slightly unsteady on my feet getting out of the truck and making my way to the front door, but with the way Dad was hovering, you’d’ve thought I was going to collapse at any second.

I flopped onto the couch as soon as we were in the house. Dad offered to cook something, but seemed happy enough to just bring me the cup of tea I asked for.

A few minutes later I was hunched forward, sipping the warm drink with Dad cater-corner, facing me from his recliner.

“Taylor…”

His tone said that it was time to start having The Conversation. Once again I found myself having trouble paying attention to him, since the bookshelf in the corner of the room was merrily glowing and humming at me, demanding my attention.

I knew I should’ve been freaking out. Clearly I had some sort of brain damage the doctors hadn’t picked up because this was now the second time I was hallucinating sound and light coming from books. Not every book, mind you. But the bookshelf in the corner had at least a dozen volumes that seemed insistent that I should pay attention to them.

I wrenched my eyes away from the bookshelf and forced myself to focus on Dad. I raised my eyebrows in a half-question and waited for him to continue talking.

“Taylor, honey,” he went on, “you’re not ever going back to that school.”

The conviction in his voice startled me. He could see the question on my face. “They put you in the hospital. And the _way_ they did it…” he started to trail off.

“Just give it to me straight, Dad,” I said levelly. “Just gimme the facts first.”

“Just the facts, ma’am,” he smiled to himself.

“Taylor, someone at that school filled your locker with filth. With excrement and biological waste.” His mouth twisted in disgust. That was fucking foul but I didn’t want to interrupt him before he told me the whole story.

“You were shoved in there, kiddo. Shoved into a locker filled with biohazard garbage. And nobody let you out for almost _five hours_.” The disgust in his voice turned to the anger and incredulity I knew all too well. Every pointless meeting with a local politician, every failed attempt to get work for ‘his boys’ in the Dockworkers’ Union, every parahuman or gang fight that they had to push back or hide from was always followed by a rant over the dinner table colored by that same tone of disbelief and anger.

Dad was old enough to have lived his teenage years before parahumans. It seemed to be this constant thing that anyone over the age of 45 to 50 or so just couldn’t seem to fully wrap their heads around parahumans. Like unless you were a little kid when parahumans first appeared in the early 80’s, it was always going to be surreal that there were people flying around and shooting laser beams out of their butts or whatever. And the conflict and destruction they brought with them was always going to evoke disbelief and anger. To old people, parahumans were mostly just a problem.

Oh.

Wait.

Oh hell.

Was that what the light and sound was? Was I some sort of parahuman now?

I set the thought aside immediately. It was ludicrous, of course, and as soon as I realized I was just hallucinating, I’d only be bitterly disappointed. Better to not even acknowledge the thought.

“Oh,” I finally replied. Dad seemed to take my wool-gathering as feeling the same shock and disgust he did.

“ _Five goddamn hours_ , Taylor. The stench alone meant they had to close the school and yet not a single student, not a single teacher, nobody let you out.

“They said when a janitor finally came and cut the lock open, you were screaming and delusional. They said you attacked the janitor and a couple of teachers. Those people tried to tell me I had to sign settlement papers or they would try to prosecute you for assault.”

I cocked my head every so slightly. Dad was on a roll and I didn’t want to interrupt him.

“Can you believe those bastard bureaucrats? That damn blood-sucking lawyer!” There was a certain irony to this since one of our best family friends was Mr. Henderson, the lawyer for the Union. I hadn’t seen him since Mom died, but I knew Dad still saw or worked with him regularly.

“Taylor, sweetie? Who would do that you? The doctors said you were so lucky not to get a blood infection that could’ve killed you. Kiddo, what happened?”

Whoa. Okay. Um. The past two days had seen Dad and me exchange more words than we probably had in the three years since Mom died, but…

Could I really do this? Talk to him about this? I mean, the way he’d just disappeared into himself after Mom died. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still angry at him. He basically abandoned me for years. If it hadn’t been for Emma and her parents, there were definitely a buncha months there where I wouldn’t’ve even had meals to eat or clean clothes to wear.

But…

But it was like something had gotten knocked loose. The coma just… I dunno. It hit some sort of ‘reset’ button on my brain. Despite the hallucinations and lingering soreness I felt more… fine? Fine. Yeah, fine. For the first time in a very long time, I felt fine. Like this was how I was _supposed_ to feel.

It was a weird experience.

“Okay. Um, well. Go to my room, in my closet look for the pink box on the upper shelf on the left. Behind that.”

He paused for a moment, and then nodded.

His footsteps tromped up the stairs and I heard the door to my room open. I stretched out fully, laying down on the couch, and closed my eyes, draping my arm over my face.

There were more noises from upstairs and then Dad’s heavy footsteps coming back down the stairs, more slowly this time.

“Taylor…” he said, slowly turning the pages in the journal where I’d documented all of the bullying from the past semester.

“Dad, please. I can’t really talk about it. I’m still tired from the hospital,” I lied. “But I know what you’re thinking, and yes, the Emma listed in that journal is _Emma_ Emma. And that’s just this past semester. She’s been doing it since high school started. Making my life a living hell.”

Dad sunk slowly and heavily back into his chair. He turned the pages. I shifted the arm over my face slightly, and dared a quick look at him.

Oh shit. He was completely still and his face was beet red. This was not good.

A few minutes later he carefully closed the book, folded it under his arm, and stood up.

“Honey, I need to go out for a little while. There’s some leftovers in the fridge you can heat up for dinner. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Dad, wait…” I tried.

But it was too late. He was barreling out the front door, even forgetting his coat in the process. I felt like I should react. I should think about what Dad’s temper was about to lead him into doing. But I was suddenly overwhelmed with it all. I felt… weary. The hospital, the hallucinations, coming clean to Dad, all of it. I lay back again and fell asleep.

=

When I woke up it was dark in the house and Dad was asleep in his recliner next to me.

I got up slowly, trying not to disturb him.

Cold pizza in the fridge. Good enough.

Halfway through my second slice, Dad stirred. He cracked his eyes open, saw me munching on his leftovers from… whenever… and gave me a smile. “Honey I think that pizza is from the Jurassic era.”

I shrugged. “Pizza’s pizza,” I replied sagely.

“So what happened?” I ventured, briefly glancing up at him from my archeological dinner.

“I took your journal over to Pete’s office,” Dad said, mentioning the Union’s lawyer. “He wasn’t thrilled about me barging in on him, but when I told him the story and showed him the journal, he got real focused, really fast.

“First things first, honey. You’re never going back to that school. Pete said there’s a bunch of stuff we need to do to get you registered to do homeschooling, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

“Next, we’ll need to talk to the cops, first thing tomorrow. There’s already a detective assigned to this case, a guy who stopped by the hospital while you were still out of it. Pete said to bring a copy of this journal and any other evidence you might have…?”

“Just lots of visits to the nurse and all the hate mails they’ve been emailing to me,” I conceded.

At ‘hate mail’ the look on Dad’s face got even more murderous.

“We’ll make this right honey. They’ll pay for this. They’ll pay for this.”

=

I spent the next week lazing around the house. After claiming a couple of times that I still felt to tired to start in on any real work, or to really do anything, Dad backed off completely. I had to go talk to the cops twice and a lawyer once, but by now it was all just blurring into an endless stream of reciting the same horrifying facts. I’d suggested with no small amount of malice that they should lean hard on Madison and tell her she could go to jail tried as an adult for attempted murder, and that she’d immediately roll over on the other girls. Being a huge book worm who read tons of hardboiled detective novels came in handy for once!

A few days later, Dad gleefully informed me that it’d worked and that once Madison started spilling the beans, a half-dozen different students came forward, trying to offer evidence to save their own skins. I didn’t ask him how he knew the details of an ongoing police investigation, but my guess was that there were plenty of guys in the Union with family who were cops.

Mostly I spent that week trying to avoid the increasing insistence our household’s book collection had on convincing me that I was insane. The light and humming coming from the books was getting completely out of hand.

=

**Mon 1/17/11**

Okay, bookshelf, you win.

Stop with the ringing!

I angrily grabbed _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone_. The Harry Potter books were glowing more strongly than almost any others, so I decided to just take the first one and shake some sense into it. Turning the book around in my hands and casually flipping the pages revealed nothing special. The light and noise were more… metaphorical… than anything else, so reorienting the book or riffling through the pages didn’t do anything.

I stomped down the stairs, flopped on the couch, and started reading. Harry and I had taken the Hogwart’s Express dozens of times together, but this time something was different. It felt so real. Not like watching a movie, or my normal spaciness when imaging scenes from a book. This felt _real_. This _was_ real. I tore through the book faster than ever before, finishing the thing in less than an hour.

As I neared the end of the story, I kept imaging what it’d be like to be a wizard myself (okay, okay, witch). I put myself in Harry’s shoes, getting the letter that invited me not just to a school but to a whole new world. Wizard abilities would be _so_ awesome and like Eidolon-level powered in the real world. My eyes moved over the final words of the book but my mind was far afield, drifting in fantasies of holding the letter, seeing the gothic script, and being whisked away from all of my problems.

My hands unconsciously stroked across the pages, turning roughly to the middle of the book.

Suddenly, the glow around the book flared actinic bright, and a square of light appeared just on top of the open pages. My eyes widened despite the overwhelming glare. A scroll of parchment began emerging from the book itself. After a few seconds, the scroll emerged completely and flopped quietly over, tumbling onto the couch. The light faded from the book the moment the scroll emerged.

What.

The.

 _Fuck_.

=

Okay so a few things were pretty clear. First, the light and humming from all the other books in the house dimmed down to basically nothing after the scroll magically appeared.

Second, the scroll was Harry’s acceptance letter to Hogwarts. Or at least that’s what it looked like. It felt like what I imagined thick old parchment would feel like, but the letter itself didn’t seem magical or anything. I screwed my courage up and showed Dad the letter that night and he thought it was a funny old thing and asked where in the basement I’d found it.

So either I’ve gone so insane that I’m hallucinating conversations with Dad now, or I’m somehow the world’s crappiest parahuman, with the ability to manifest random, meaningless objects out of books.

Or even worse, I thought, this was it – I had one shot to make a magic item and I screwed it up by making a damn _letter_. That same night I tore through the next Harry Potter book but nothing, nada.

Crap.

=

**Mon 1/24/11**

Oh thank god.

The humming and light was back.

It took basically a whole week. There was the very slightest bit of light and noise over the week, but when I woke up exactly a week later, my bookshelf was once again doing its Christmas-tree-slash-bell-choir act again.

I decided to keep plowing through Harry Potter since the first book showed me that I’m not insane, I just have a really weird power. I started tearing through _Chamber of Secrets_ as soon as I woke up. I think Dad might have poked his head into my room at some point and made noises about breakfast, but if he did he saw me reading and gave up.

Once again, reading the book felt _real_. So much more real that even real life. When I got to the bit about the Polyjuice potion my mind once again decided it had a mind of its own. I started daydreaming about Alexandria. I’d wanted to be her since I was like four years old and my brain got into loops of replaying the same fantasy over and over – drinking the Polyjuice potion and becoming Alexandria. My imagination didn’t seem to understand that the Polyjuice potion just changed how you appeared – the fantasy had me flying around and punching out Behemoth. I was so captivated with the thought of becoming Alexandria that reason couldn’t intrude.

This time when I finished the book, I consciously turned the pages to about the middle of the book and flattened it open on my bed. The lightshow and portal thing reappeared, with a small glass vial emerging. The lights faded and the vial thunked quietly onto my sheets.

All in a rush, I grabbed the vial, opened the stopper and chugged the vile-tasting liquid.

I started to feel really queasy and weird. I staggered to the bathroom and watched in horror as my flesh rippled and bubbled. My eyes grew and shrunk, my cheeks inflating and deflating. Worst of all, my hair rapidly retracted into my head. My fingers shortened and widened. _I_ shortened and widened. Three horrifyingly infinite minutes later, I found myself staring at my reflection – a short, fat, pig-eyed boy no more than 12 or 13 years old.

FUCK.

It turned me into Crabbe. Or Goyle.

Of course it did. That’s what it did in the book. Polyjuice potion doesn’t change you into a random person you admire, you specifically have to craft it to look like a particular person. So whatever my unconscious mind pulled out, it was the potion to look like one of those two goons.

Well at least it would wear off shortly.

=

Later that morning Dad called from work to let me know he’d be coming home for lunch. He’d done that every day the first few days I was out of the hospital, but started working late again or staying through lunch a week back. I could hardly be mad at him. He probably had tons of work to get caught up on.

I decided to surprise him with a big home cooked meal, and spent the next hour trying to bash a bunch of ingredients into submission. Despite having to basically fend for myself for the past three years, I still wasn’t a good enough cook that I could run on auto-pilot, but I still occasionally found myself staring sadly into space thinking about yet another failed experiment with my power.

Now that I’d pulled items from two books, I was near-certain that it would just keep happening each week. Sure, Harry’s letter was useless and the Polyjuice potion was actually useless _and_ painful, but I was starting to get a clear idea of how much potential my power had. A quick skim through the house had revealed that only novels seemed to glow, but that didn’t worry me – there were a _lot_ of novels out there. Right now, I was going to stick with the Harry Potter books since they glowed strongly and had tons of great stuff in them.

=

As Dad and I were wrapping up lunch, he set his fork down and gave me a serious look.

“So there’s two things we needed to talk about.”

Uh-oh.

He smiled, “Don’t get that look on your face! It’s nothing bad, just some stuff we have to do. It’s been almost three weeks since you were in Winslow,” I couldn’t help the unconscious twitch of disgust at the name, “and we need to start moving on the homeschool stuff. Turns out New Jersey has a state regulation that says all homeschooled kids have to meet with a homeschooling group for at least six hours a week that meets all sorts of rules. Fortunately, there’s a group that meets two hours each morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and it’s already established over at the north branch of the library. So you can walk there easily. I’ve called the guy who runs it and he said they recently had a student move away so they have room for one more.”

Great, I finally get away from school and now I’m being forced back into a group of teenagers. Well, at least it was only three really short sessions each week.

“Um, okay,” I responded.

Dad seemed amused at my flat reaction. “Don’t worry, honey it’ll be fine. These are all kids with sp… unusual circumstances themselves, not at all like what you were dealing with before.” I could see him hesitate at the idea of describing me as “special needs.” Well, I mean I _did_ have special needs. I needed to not go to high school with a bunch of psychopaths and violent sadists, and the mere existence of Winslow made it clear that the adults thought that was a _special_ _need_.

“No really, Dad it’s okay. I dealt with that place, I can deal with a little study group a few times a week.”

He sighed. “Good. Great. That’s great, honey. I picked up all the books and study packets and stuff in the car. There’s a bunch of homework you’ll have to submit to the teacher at each study session and other papers to mail in and whatnot. The instructions seemed pretty clear, and I’m going to expect you to handle it.”

He put on his serious Dad voice near the end there. I couldn’t help it. I rolled my eyes a little. So sue me! I may have the phenomenal cosmic power to warp reality itself by manifesting magical objects that had previously only existed in the wildest of man’s imaginings, but I was still a teenager.

“You said there were two things?”

“Yeah,” he paused. “I wanted to give you an update on the legal stuff.”

He took a moment to gather his thoughts. Honestly, this worried me less than the homeschooling crap I was going to have to put up with. I was out of Winslow, safe from _them_ and that was all I cared about.

“Something really weird is going on,” he continued. “The one black girl, Sophia, is already in jail. I don’t know if she had a prior record or what, but apparently the authorities went to her house and brought her out in some sort of strange restraints. It was only dumb luck we found out, because Joey, you remember him, honey, he works for me, he was here for fourth of July, he was the really fat guy who accidentally spilled beer all over… you know what never mind. Anyway, Joey’s cousin Vinny is a cop and he happened to be responding to a call to a house right across the street. He was coming out of that house when Sophia was being hustled into this black car and taken away. Joey said Vinny said it looked like the feds.

“So that’s odd enough, but after offering that offensive settlement and stonewalling for the past two weeks, the school board’s lawyer showed up at my office this morning. He looked completely freaked out, sweaty, nervous. He gave me this,” Dad pulled a sheet of paper out of his back pocket, unfolded it, and slid it across the table.

I started skimming though. A bunch of legalese about not talking to anyone ever about it, some stuff I didn’t understand, and then my eyes drifted to the final bullet point. “… good consideration for the terms above… yadda yadda… pay the sum of 750,000 USD to a trust in the name of Taylor Hebert… payment to Daniel Hebert in the amount of 150,000 USD…”

Holy. Shit.

“Dad…?” I couldn’t even formulate a question. They were paying us almost a _million_ dollars!? What the hell was going on here?

“I’m going to talk to Pete this afternoon, but if this looks like what I think, then I think we should consider taking it.”

“What do you mean ‘what I think’?”

“Honey, you could have died. You repeatedly reported bullying and they ignored you. You were attacked with biohazard material on government property. And if my suspicions about that Sophia girl are correct, there’s some really shady stuff going on here. I think they’re absolutely petrified of the scandal that this could be. I mean the whole school board, the commissioner, the entire faculty at Winslow, whatever’s going on with those feds. They’d all lose their jobs in disgrace and more than a few people would go to jail. It’d be a bloodbath. If this thing blew up, and it’s insane enough to make national news… well, kid, I think they know they’re sitting on a massive ticking time bomb and they’re hoping to spend a cool million bucks to buy their way out of it.

“So that’s the question, honey. Do you want to let them off the hook for a million bucks? It’s a lot of money, but we can survive, we _have_ survived without it. If you want to go for the justice you deserve instead of taking this money, I will back your decision 100%.”

“No. No, Dad. I’m done with them. I’m done with that place. I don’t ever want to think about Winslow or any of those girls or any of it ever again. To me, being allowed to teach myself what those useless teachers couldn’t matters more than any money. And there wouldn’t be any justice, not really. Some people might get fired, but the gangs would still be there. Petty, evil, bitches will always exist somewhere and getting teachers in trouble wouldn’t solve that problem. Let’s just take the money and put it behind us.

“One thing, though. Here where it says something about ‘trust’ instead of just paying me the money, what’s that? Does that mean that we don’t get my money right away?”

“Oh, no, not at all. I just means they don’t hand a 15 year old girl a suitcase filled with three quarters of a million bucks. It goes into a sort of bank account, and I’ll be what’s called the trustee, the person who oversees the account. So until you’re 18, I’ll be in charge of your ‘allowance’ from the money and whatever’s there when you turn 18 is all yours.”

I couldn’t help the skepticism that crossed my face.

Dad laughed, “Don’t worry, I’ll set it up with a credit card you can have so you don’t have to come running to me every time you want to buy a latte.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that. How do you follow up a conversation about suddenly having more money that you’d ever dreamed of? ‘Oh I’m glad my suffering and coma got us a million bucks, Dad, can you please pass the salt?’


	2. Book 1 - Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taylor has some growing pains.

**Book 1 – Chapter 2**

**Tue 1/25/11**

I spent that afternoon wading through all the books and papers Dad brought for the homeschooling stuff. Daily lesson plans to follow, homework to submit at each meeting. No shock, the state standard plans for my various sophomore-level classes showed that Winslow was way, way behind. I was gonna have a lot of catching up to do.

Apparently the guy running the homeschool group was called a Preceptor and mine was Mr. Leigh. That and I was going to have to be at the library at 9:30 tomorrow morning

=

**Wed 1/26/11**

The library branch near my house was one of those little one-room places that was about 80% taken up with the children’s section, since it mostly functioned as a daycare for neighborhood mothers. There was a sad, broken-down-looking photocopier off to one side and an even more sad, broken-down-looking librarian behind the counter. She took one look at me and gestured her head towards a door on the far wall. She probably knew that any mopey teenager in baggy clothes coming in on a weekday morning was one of those homeschool kids rather than a regular patron. As I went by her she croaked out, “If you’re Miss Hebert, you’ll need to stop and see me at the end of the session.”

She knew my name? Well, I wasn’t gonna worry, it was probably just another paperwork thing. I walked into the room just a few minutes before 9:30. The room was dominated by a single large table, with four kids – two boys and two girls – seated around it. No adult in sight.

“Hey, a new girl!” one of the girls chirped out in a slightly slurred voice. She looked totally unremarkable – brown eyes, straight brown hair – except leaning next to her on the table was a pair of those crutches with the forearm-brace things. Her arms and hands were also moving a little oddly.

“Um, hi? I’m Taylor.”

“Hey Taylor, I’m Fran, welcome to the Group. You can…”

“Yeah, yeah, hey new girl. Grab a seat,” one of the boys interrupted, waving towards an unoccupied seat on an empty side of the table. He was strikingly good looking, with huge blue eyes and a mop of blonde hair that spoke to either ludicrous good luck in the gene pool or hours spent painstakingly mussing his hair into the perfect bedhead.

“Ooookay…” I drawled out, trying not to be offended at his dismissive tone. “Should I sit here, though? Doesn’t the teacher sit on this side and face us…” I trailed off as the group started laughing at my mention of ‘the teacher.’

“What?” I asked, not sure if I should smile along with them or what.

“Oh, we’re not laughing at you, Taylor,” Fran said.

The girl sitting next to her, who couldn’t’ve been older than 11, picked up Fran’s sentence, “yeah Mr. Leigh isn’t exactly a ‘teacher.’ He doesn’t even collect the homework. Maybe he won’t even show up today. Usually once every week or two he just signs the papers saying we all did our work and gives all of us ‘exceeds expectations’ on all the little things on the form. The only reason we have to show up and stay the whole time is that the librarian is the one who actually tracks attendance and she’s real strict. This one time should wouldn’t even let me leave early when…”

“Oh my god, Gal, stop. Mrs. Calloway was right to keep you here until the official end time. Needing to go stand in line to buy advance tickets to a movie does _not_ qualify as an ‘emergency’ that gets you out of Group,” the other boy interrupted. He was tall and really built, with the kind of very darkly black and perfectly smooth skin that suggested recent immigration from somewhere in Africa.

“Anyway,” he continued, “If Mr. Leigh does show up, he’ll just sit there,” he waved to the corner of the room and a ratty upholstered chair. “He gives us general discussion topics sometimes or assigns us essays to write, but Gal’s right he doesn’t really do much to run the Group.”

The blond boy snorted, “this is where Gaz tries to assert his dominance over you and play the role of teacher like he’s always wanted.”

“Shut it, Ellis!”

“Oh come on, you’ve been waiting for Joey to graduate for _months_ now since you think you should be in charge since you’re the oldest.”

“It’s only appropriate that…”

“Please. The person in charge should be the smartest person in the…”

“And I suppose you think that’s you?” the black boy interrupted.

“Fuck no, we all know who’s smartest by a country mile,” at that, all four students turned to look at Fran.

“Guys, stop it! You’re embarrassing me in front of the new girl.”

I couldn’t help but smile at the whole the exchange. Sure, Ellis and Gaz (what the heck kind of name is ‘Gaz’?) were arguing with some real heat behind their words, but it felt like a comfortable, long-treaded pathway with no actual malice in it.

I started, still somewhat uncertainly, “So, if Mr. Leigh doesn’t show up?”

The youngest girl, whose tanned skin and dark eyes made her look Spanish, or maybe Italian or something spoke up first: “We all have homework we’re supposed to be doing so sometimes we do that. Sometimes Fran helps us with really hard assignments, even Gary,” she smiled over at the guy Ellis had called ‘Gaz’ earlier. “Sometimes we play board games,”

“No Diplomacy!” Ellis interrupted, pointing his finger straight up in the hair and shaking it slightly in emphasis. That got a smile from everyone in the room.

“What?” I asked, the height of intelligence.

“Diplomacy,” Gal continued, “is a board game based on World War I. Mr. Leigh suggested it as a sort of history assignment. It’s not like Monopoly or Trouble or a _normal_ board game. You move your armies around and you have to make alliances with people, but basically Ellis and Fran started _completely lying_ right from the beginning, and Ellis is a _lying betraying bastard_ who you should never trust when he says his French army unit will support your Austrian unit while attacking Italy…”

Ellis interrupted, “Jesus, Gala, let it go. I already bought you ice cream three times to apologize for the fall of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine. Plus I kinda doubt Taylor cares about a board game we played one time months ago.”

“Ellis remembering a historical fact! Guess the game did work,” Fran commented.

“Fuck you, Miss Backstabbing Ottoman Empire,” Ellis muttered under his breath, which only got a bigger grin from Fran.

“Aaaaanyway,” the youngest broke in. “So we do work or do ‘work’ and sometimes we just hang out and read or watch movies on Fran’s iPad. But! But we’ve got a new girl! Which is super-exciting and now we have to do introductions!”

I could see Fran and Gary nodding along and Ellis rolling his eyes.

“I’m Gala, but please call me Gal. Hmm... what else?”

“Why don’t you tell her why you’re homeschooled?” Ellis shot. I could see Fran tense up immediately.

Gary smoothly cut in, “Inappropriate, Ellis. We’re all here for our own reasons, and there’s no call to interrupt friendly introductions with your baggage.

“Gal, why don’t you tell Taylor how old you are, what you’re studying, and some stuff about yourself?” Gary suggested gently.

“Oh right!” she chirped, “So I’m Gal… I already said that… and um, I’m 14. Yeah, yeah I know,” she said reacting to the surprise that must’ve shown on my face, “I look like I’m 12 or something. But I had some medical stuff when I was a kid so I’m just a little behind. I have trouble with dyslexia and dyscalculia but Fran helps me a bunch. I love the Maggie Holt books and have seen all the movies at the opening night midnight show, except the most recent one since a certain tall dark and handsome _Nazi_ wouldn’t let me leave early to buy…”

“Gal!” Fran rebuked at the same time Ellis once again rolled his eyes and Gary laughed, “Central Powers, Gal! _Central_ powers! Not Nazis. I was Emperor Wilhelm, not Chancellor Hitler. And c’mon we said we would let Diplomacy go. You can’t still be mad at me that my Russian and German units crushed your Austrian forces.”

“So um, yeah, I guess that’s me.” Gal wrapped up.

Fran smoothly picked up, “I’m Frances,” she gave a slightly wobbly nod to her crutches, “and I’ll just deal with my personal elephant in the room. I have cerebral palsy. No, I’m not retarded, it’s my muscles that don’t work, not my brain,” she said in a line that sounded well-rehearsed.

“C’mon Fran, even _I_ know you’re not supposed to say retarded,” Ellis interjected.

“Fuck you Ellis,” Fran said without any anger in her voice. “These idiots all seem to think I’m the obligatory ‘smart one’ of the group, but I don’t know about that. I’m 15, and I grew up here in Brockton. I used to go to Immaculata but my parents pulled me since I was so far ahead of the classes that they were mostly pointless plus the other girls there was basically weapons-grade bitches.”

I nodded at that, giving a wry half-smile and Fran nodded back.

“Anyway, I’ll knock out the GED and SATs this coming May and probably start classes at BBU this summer or fall.”

“Acts like she’s not a genius starting college at 15,” Ellis interrupted.

“I’ll be 16 in June,” she replied.

“Me too!” I couldn’t help myself from chirping out.

That got me a big smile from Fran, “Us Geminis gotta stick together.” She turned and looked at Ellis expectantly.

“Sheesh. Fine. I’m Ellis. My parents are assholes who think regular school is corrupting me away from good Christian values. I’m 16 and I know you think I’m hot. But, sorry, not available.”

He stopped abruptly. Actually he did everything abruptly. I had no idea what to make of him and before I could even begin to formulate a reaction to his casual comment about how hot I thought he was, Gary started talking.

“Hey, I’m Gary. Ellis insists on calling me Gaz but I would really prefer you didn’t. I’m both the token immigrant and the token black kid in the group.” The fact that a statement that… uncomfortable… could be said totally flat and not get a reaction from any of the other kids really emphasized how well they all seemed to know each other. “I was born in Sudan and my parents moved us here when I was a baby after Behemoth hit Khartoum and destroyed one of the last democratic regimes in Africa. I’m a huge science nerd and when I finish up with high school at the end of this year I’ll be…”

Ellis interrupted for the millionth time that morning “… be going to MIT. Blah, blah, lah-de-dah, ‘I’m a super…’”

Here Gary interrupted him right back into the same lilting, fake voice, “‘…super-genius who’s going to study tinkertech at MIT because I’m a super-science guy who’s into science.’”

“Uhhh… so I guess it’s a little hard to follow all of that. My name’s Taylor Hebert and I…”

The ever-interrupting Ellis cut me off this time, “Wait, Hebert? Like Danny Hebert? The Demon of the Docks?”

“The what?!” I near-shouted.

“Oh my god, it is the same Hebert. What is he your uncle?”

“Dad,” I responded.

“Holy crap your Dad is the Demon Danny?” Ellis found this the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“What the heck does that even mean?”

“My Dad works with a bunch of guys who do business with the consolidated union and your Dad, he…” for once Ellis paused looking like he was suddenly thinking better than just blurting out his immediate thought. “He’s got a reputation for being a really… tough… negotiator.”

Oh. Wow. Okay. Well, I mean you know your parents have this whole other parent-world that they operate in but you never stop to think about what it means and such. I couldn’t help but be a little surprised and a little proud. If Ellis had said that to me even three weeks ago I would’ve been pissed that Dad had enough energy to work hard and fight for his ‘boys’ at the docks but couldn’t do a damn thing for me, but after the past few weeks of getting back to something like a normal relationship, I felt a mix of confusion and pride instead.

“Yes. My Dad is the Demon of the Docks. And if you interrupt me again I’ll unleash hell on you,” I said.

Everyone but Ellis immediately gave a smile or laugh.

“Like Fran I grew up here in Brockton, I’m 15, 16 in June. Unlike Fran I’m not a super-genius and I’m kinda behind on classes since I used to go to Winslow and that place is a total crap-hole. I like to read a lot. _A lot_ a lot. That’s it, I guess.” I trailed off.

Gal immediately piped up, “Oh, have you read Maggie Holt? Which villain do you think…”

Before Gal could complete the thought, the door swung open. A older man, easily six and a half feet tall and four hundred pounds, shuffled in and plopped into the chair in the corner. It gave an ominous groan.

“Good morning, Mister Leigh,” the other four chimed out in near-unison.

Before they were done talking, he already had his head down and eyes shut. “Good morning, children. Carry on,” he gave a lazy wave with his hand.

Gary spoke up, “Mr. Leigh we have our new student Taylor Hebert with us today.”

He cracked an eye half-open and barely lifted his head, “Hebert, huh? Any relation to the Demon of the Docks?”

“I told you so!” crowed Ellis.

“Yeah he’s my Dad.”

That got both of his eyes open and his head lifted to an almost-fully-erect position. “Well then Miss Hebert I will make you a very simple deal. Never mention me, ever, to your father and I will give you ‘exceeds expectations’ in all reports and forms for the remainder of your time with The Homeschool Academic Group.”

“We’re the HAG?” I asked without thinking.

That got a laugh from Ellis. “You’re a HAG, Harry!” I couldn’t help but flinch slightly at the reference.

“Miss Hebert?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure thing Mr. Leigh. Not a peep,” I made the little zipping closed and throwing away the key motion over my mouth. Before I was even done speaking, his head had drifted back down to his chest.

“Does he always smell like old beer and cigarettes?” I whispered to the group.

They nodded.

A moment of silence followed and Gary took charge, “Okay so for today since Taylor is new I think we should…”

=

The rest of the morning passed much more quickly than I would’ve expected. Gary was really well-organized and even if he came across as kind of bossy, he definitely kept things moving in a way I wouldn’t’ve expected from a high school student. We all went over where we were in our curriculum, and split off into ever-shifting pairs to help each other with various assignments. Before I knew it, time was up, and we all tromped out to the librarian and signed a form indicating the time we’d been there and our total hours for the semester.

Just before we all left the library, the old lady turned to Gary, “how bad?”

“Just sleepy today. He should be up and out in no time.”

That got a perfunctory nod from her and a questioning look from me.

Well anyway, a useless alcoholic Preceptor was still a huge step up from the entire faculty at Winslow, and I’d been more productive that morning than I had been since starting high school. Trying to explain some basic algebra stuff to Gal had helped me organize my own thinking and understanding better than any amount of time spent falling asleep listening to Quinlan’s boring math lectures. I headed back home with more energy than I’d had in a long time.

=

That afternoon I spent some time re-reading the most of the Harry Potter series mulling over what to pull once my power reset in a week. A sudden thought occurred to me – maybe I should pull out Hedwig. First, having my own magical owl would be _awesome_ , and second maybe my power worked better with animals than things.

Dad got home a little early and said we needed to go to Pete’s office to sign all the paperwork for the settlement money. On the one hand, I was glad it was such a fast, unremarkable affair. On the other, it felt like it should’ve been more momentous. Just a bunch of signatures and initialings and we walked out of the office soon-to-be financially independent. For a little household that had trouble making sure all the bills were paid, it was a life-changing amount of money. Dad seemed to have some extra spring in his step as we headed back to the truck.

“How about an early dinner at Lucio’s?” he asked.

I couldn’t help the pang at hearing the name of the fancy Italian restaurant. It’d been Mom’s favorite place and where they’d always gone for anniversaries. I forced a smile, “Sure thing, Dad! My treat! I can afford it.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that, Miss Hebert. Plus I’m getting the lobster.”

=

**Thu 1/27/11**

Thursday ended up just being boring homework, but I found myself actively looking forward to meeting with the HAG the next morning. I stopped halfway through my trig homework, turning that notion around in my head. I was actually _eager_ to see my ‘classmates’ for once. Even Ellis, douche that he was, treated me like a normal person and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to, well, _looking_ at him.

=

**Fri 1/28/11**

Group went basically the same, with us helping each other with homework and Gal constantly trying to derail me into discussions about the Maggie Holt books and movies. Mr. Leigh didn’t even show up this time, but based on what everyone had said, I wasn’t surprised.

We actually ended up staying well past the required 11:30am finish time, and got kicked out by the librarian a little past noon. Apparently the yoga club had the room reserved and was getting their yoga pants in a twist that we were making them late.

As the Group started heading out towards the front door, Fran asked me if I wanted to head over to Bobo’s for some lunch. Bobo’s was a Brockton landmark, the breakfast counterpoint to Fugly Bob’s coronary-inducing lunches and dinners. Her request got a rude comment from Ellis about waffles for lunch, but everyone (me included) ignored him.

Fran and I headed over to the bus stop up a few blocks. It took a bit longer, since Fran was a little slower than a normal walk with her crutches. She had pretty impressive shoulders, though, and trucked along almost as fast as my usual pace.

We talked about random, inconsequential stuff while waiting for the bus up to the boardwalk. As we got on, I couldn’t help but notice how many people on the bus shot Fran disapproving looks at her fumbling around in her pockets for bus fare. Even making our way down the central aisle of the bus to find seats was kind of a slow, awkward affair. I felt embarrassed and was then ashamed of myself for being embarrassed. There was nothing wrong with Fran, she was awesome. She kept up a running babble about Joey, the kid who had graduated shortly before I joined the Group, totally ignoring the side-eye she was getting from a bunch of other bus riders.

We plopped onto seats near the back of the bus – well, I plopped and she levered herself down slowly – and Fran just kept motor-mouthing forward, “so then after Joey convinced Gary that his uncle was actually Elon Musk, Gary starts getting all fanboy with him about ‘only guy left doing real science’ and bashing tinkertech and Ellis can’t help himself and he starts arguing that Dragon’s and Masamune’s tinkertech has done more for the world than some random human engineer could…”

=

Waffles were awesome, as was Fran. I’d only met her twice but I already felt totally comfortable thinking of her as ‘my friend from school’. Huh. Imagine that. A friend from school. The _normal_ is so comforting when you’ve been without it for so long.

=

**Mon 1/31/11**

Oh my god Group is taking forever. Mr. Leigh showed up with a scowl this morning. I don’t know what crawled up his ass, but whatever it was had apparently decided to use our drunken Preceptor as a sock puppet and put on a little puppet show called “guy tries to pretend he’s a strict teacher but doesn’t actually know what he’s doing.”

Plus, you know, it’d been a week. So soon I was going to be the proud owner of a Hedwig. _So_ cool.

=

I decided to summon him in my room rather than flopped on the couch since he might come out startled and I didn’t want him destroying something or doing his business on anything anywhere else in the house. I made sure my window was closed, and the closet and bedroom doors were both firmly shut.

Ah, Harry. The train ride interrupted by Dementors yet again. Lupin, Black, and that bastard Pettigrew. For all that the series grew in scope, depth, and imagination later on, the third book had always been my favorite. I’ve always had a soft spot for time-travel. I felt myself starting to get sucked into daydreams about having a time turner, but this time I was able to wrestle my brain back to constantly thinking about Hedwig. The owl was a genius. Of course. It’d shown an ability to follow complex commands, track down Hermione on vacation in France with little more instruction than “take this to Hermione.” Maybe I could get my Hedwig to help around the house. I giggled at the thought of confusing the neighbors by having an owl fly in and out of the house delivering trash to the can out front.

I got the end of the story, slowly and carefully turned the book to the middle. I thought hard about Hedwig and pulled on the glow surrounding the book.

The portal formed quickly and easily, and a white mass of fur and talons _shot_ out. An unholy screeching filled the room. I clapped my hands over my ears, but it was no use. The sound was deafening. That was definitely Hedwig, but something was really, really wrong with her. She darted back and forth across the room, smacking into my desk, the walls, and the window. The tiny glance I got at her face showed one of her enormous yellow eyes rolling around randomly. Her other eye was so bloodshot it was almost solid red, staring straight ahead independent of her other eye. She zoomed in circles and smacked into the window. She darted across to the wall over my head and smashed into it head first. Barely falling, she reoriented herself, gave three powerful flaps, and once again brained herself on the window.

I got off the bed, and stayed low to avoid getting hurt myself. My heart was hammering in my chest, but I knew the only hope was to stay calm. In a low voice, “Hey there, Hedwig, it’s okay, it’s okay girl…”

Her red eye snapped to me on hearing her name.

Uh oh.

She screeched louder than ever and flew straight at my face. My pathetic attempt to dodge meant those very sharp and suddenly very scary black talons took a chunk out of my right earlobe instead of my eyes and made a huge gash on the corner of my forehead. I tried rolling away, but the crazed thing managed to get her mouth on my finger and take a hearty _chomp_ before returning to madly careening around my room.

I cried in pain and held my hand tucked in close and started scooting back towards the door. This was bad. So bad. What the fuck. How was I going to calm it down? Did I do something wrong? Those talons could rip my throat out…

My brain spun in circles even faster than the ones it was doing around the room. After the dozenth attempt, it finally succeeded in smashing through the glass of my bedroom window.

And it was gone.

My immediate rush of relief was tempered by a sudden worry about the possibility of it hurting someone else. I had to tell myself that animals went rabid all the time, and the city’s animal dog-catcher people must have some way to deal with them, even rabid birds.

The adrenaline faded, leaving a broken window, a surprisingly small amount of mess in my room, and _holy shit pain pain pain_ in my finger, forehead, and ear.

=

Fun fact: on Monday afternoons, Panacea sometimes does a swing through the ER waiting room at Saint Mary’s.

Another fun fact: the absolute greatest feeling in the world isn’t sex or drugs. It’s relief from pain. My fifteen long years may not have given me much experience with those first two, but experiencing the last at Panacea’s hands firmly convinced me.

Final fun fact: if you call your Dad and tell him that you cut your hand pretty bad cooking and that you’re waiting for Panacea to heal you, he gets exasperated and worried and tells you that you can afford to get take-out now instead of cutting your fingers off in the kitchen. Ha. Ha.

Actually final fun fact: not having to worry about where the money is going to come from for a repair means that when you make up a totally bullshit story about why your window’s messed up, your Dad just shakes his head and makes a joke about your finger being cut from punching through the window.

=

**Tue 2/1/11**

So thinking it over, I came to a clear decision: No animals. No people. Nothing with even the remotest hint of intelligence or a mind.

Okay, three decisions.

I was going to stick strictly to non-sentient things from now on. Despite my oh-for-three status, I was keeping to Harry Potter, since each book actually produced something, just not something I could use yet. I skimmed lightly through the _Goblet of Fire_ and figured my next goal should be Harry’s broomstick. It was made clear that their flight was inherent to them and that they didn’t depend on a whole infrastructure of a separate magical world the way Harry’s letter did. In fact, they had a really mechanical feel to them, like better models flew faster, like cars or motorcycles or something. The broomsticks had a clearly described function, weren’t sentient, and frankly being able to zip around the city would be so unbelievably cool and useful once I started actually doing hero work as a cape. Plus, this wasn’t something I could possibly screw up.

=

**Mon 2/7/11**

I could screw it up.

Fuck. _Fuck._

FUCK.

Over an entire month with my power and I still had yet to actually be able to do anything with it. At all. Other than manifest a very nice piece of parchment and an insane owl that was out there wreaking havoc, I’m sure.

So, turns out the object has to fit through the portal over the book. And the portal is the size of the book. The broomstick started coming through just fine, all richly-stained wood and everything. Then it got to the saddle-part where you actually sit on the broomstick with these two metal foot-holder stirrup things on the sides and they rather _couldn’t_ fit through the portal. As soon as they touched the edge of the portal, the top half the broomstick popped with the tiniest sigh of escaping air. The glow faded the same way it had when the objects manifest fully.

Even worse, the glow from the other novels on the shelf was also gone. I’d blown an entire week for literally nothing.

=

**Fri 2/11/11**

Okay well, not nothing. The HAG continued to be incredibly awesome. I had a real knack for teaching, which I guess came from Mom. Gal kept telling me stuff made so much more sense when I explained them. For some reason this really pissed off Ellis. I guess he saw himself as being particularly good at explaining things in his short, abrupt way. But like Ellis would say something about the problem Gal was working on and she was obviously not getting it and he’d just repeat the same thing a bit louder and jab at the book with the pencil. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so obviously frustrating to them both.

I didn’t mind too much, even though it meant we didn’t spend much time in Group reviewing my own work. Explaining stuff to Gal meant I had to think really carefully about the concepts and go through them in a simple, conversational real-world way. I was never a math person, but teaching algebra to a girl with dyscalculia was slowly turning me into one.

The Wednesday before, we’d gotten into a whole discussion about the best villains in fiction, and Gary seemed offended that I hadn’t read Asimov’s robot series. I wasn’t big on sci-fi but after claiming to be a huge fiction geek who read “ _a lot_ a lot” he took my lack of Asimov as heresy.

Near the end of doing math homework review with each other, I mentioned in passing, “Oh hey Gary, you were right. Those Robot books were pretty good.”

Gary gave me a look. “Oh you finished the first one? The others are more like real novels, but _I, Robot_ is the only one that’s a collection…”

“No,” I cut him off. “I read the series. It was only five books total, right? _Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn,_ and ending with _Robots and Empire_? Did I miss any?”

Silence.

“Liar,” was Ellis’s contribution.

“Fuck you Ellis, Taylor’s a genius, and I’m the only one in the room qualified to know,” Fran added.

“Holy cow, Taylor. How fast do you read?” asked Gal.

Huh. I’d dealt with this a bunch when I was a kid – new teachers or students saying I was totally bullshitting when I would finish tests in minutes. Despite what Fran said, I wasn’t a genius. Not by any stretch. I was terrible at science and only marginally better at math. It was just I read. Fast. _Really_ fast. I always had. So even if I was going to get like a B- on a test or something, I’d get that B- really quickly. Since high school started, none of the students would dare engage me in any real conversation and none of the teachers seemed to give a shit, so I’d stopped dealing with the whole ‘Taylor reads freaky fast’ thing.

“Yeah I don’t know but I read really fast. Maybe one to two thousand words a minute? I recently re-read the first Harry Potter book in just under an hour and I think it’s about seventy or eighty thousand words.”

More silence.

“Fuck you.”

Ellis was so eloquent. I couldn’t help but smile at him, though. That kind of casual swearing at me, with no real malice in it, really cemented to me how well I’d settled into the group in just the past couple of weeks.

Oh and the one other thing this week – the money came in from the lawyers. After we paid off a bunch of past due bills and the mortgage and went on a small shopping excursion Thursday at the Lord’s Street Market (it hadn’t taken much to convince Dad to take the afternoon off), we still had approximately a bajillionty dollars left. Dad said he would handle the whole investment thing and that I’d get an allowance of a hundred bucks a week. I thought I was hearing things – before Mom died I’d had an allowance of _five_ bucks a week.

Dad seemed to think it was hilarious that I was comparing my allowance to what I’d been given back when I was like 10. He mumbled something about teenage girls and clothes and stuff and just shrugged.

Lying in bed that night, I couldn’t help but notice how quickly the week had gone by. Just after burning _Goblet of Fire_ I thought the wait until next Monday would be interminable. But with having friends now, not stressing about money, and being able to talk to Dad about everything (well, not _everything_ , just like normal things), the days were chugging along.

**=**

**Mon 2/14/11**

I sat there on my bed. It was just past 1 am but I wasn’t tired in the slightest. Frustrated, yes. A little happy, yes. More than a little angry, a big yes.

My power seemed to be working a bit faster. So far, it’d taken exactly a week. I hadn’t quite timed it, but it seemed like the books in the house started glowing again almost at the exact time a week after I’d finished the prior book.

But I hadn’t been able to sleep Sunday night. I’d paced around the house, drank too many glasses of water, and eventually made a trip to the bathroom. Coming back into my room, I’d seen the glow was back, almost twelve hours early. Hmm.

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I tore through _The Order of the Phoenix_ in a couple of hours.

Keep it small, keep it simple. The wands themselves have magical cores to them. Let’s go for the obvious.

Harry’s wand.

Well, I got it just fine.

But.

I’m a muggle. Or something. I couldn’t figure it out. I’d been swishing the damn wand around for a half-hour, trying all different incantations. I varied the speed and movements on the wand, varied the tone, cadence, and forcefulness of my voice.

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Well, Harry’s wand may be a bust but there were two important lessons here – first, the item in question had to operate on its own independent of any special properties of the user. I began to wonder if the broomstick would’ve failed too. Second, I needed to stay very focused on summoning small, portable objects. The letter, the wand, the Polyjuice potion all came through just fine. The potion even worked _exactly_ as advertised.

=

I got a bit more sleep and headed off to Group in the morning. Mr. Leigh was present today but already asleep when we arrived. He also smelled vaguely of… well, there was no nice way to say it… poop. Either he’d stepped in dog poop or something happened. None of us could stand to be in the room with him.

The librarian spent the next hour shooting the five of us ugly looks as we whiled away the morning playing with the neighborhood kids in the children’s section. Or well, four of us did. Ellis told us we were stupid and that he had a paper to write.

Gal especially had a real knack for engaging with all of the kids, from the one year old toddlers to the five and six year olds who would be heading off to pre-school or first grade soon. I had to keep reminding myself that she was 14, since playing with the children made her look even more like a 10 or 11 year old.

We ended up engaged in an epic plushie-battle-slash-tea-party-slash-hide-and-go-seek game with triplet four year-olds that seemed to hold the other children in the gravitational pull of their excitement and imagination. Whatever outlandish thing one of them said, Gal was always ready with, “Yes! Yes and then Mr. Stegosaurus and the Hungry Caterpillar also come along and…”

Eventually our energy level and the librarian’s patience ran out and she shooed us out. In her eagerness to see us gone, she’d already filled out the attendance forms attesting that we’d been there the whole two hours despite it barely having been an hour.

I wasn’t quite ready for the fun to die entirely, so I invited Gal and Fran to go up to the boardwalk. I still couldn’t get over my little flashes of anger at people shooting Fran some serious side-eye when she worked her crutches onto the bus and to her seat. Fran and Gal didn’t seem to notice or mind, or they simply chose not to.

We commandeered a table at the back of the Starbucks right where the bus let us off at the Boardwalk. Fran and I both claimed it was blasphemy to go to Starbucks when Brockton Bay’s native Holy Grounds Coffee Shop was just a few minutes away. Plus they had really really comfy chairs, cool weird art sculptures on the walls, and this one really cute blond guy who worked there most days. But Gal insisted that she wanted one of those fancy mostly-sugar Starbucks drinks and dragged us in.

“Today was fun,” Gal suddenly commented apropos of nothing. “I usually don’t play with little kids like that much, but well, today was fun.”

I was itching to ask the obvious question, but Fran beat me to it. “Why not? You seemed really great with them.”

There was a long pause. “Well, I told you about my parents,” Gal started, looking to Fran.

She nodded, “yeah but it’s new to Taylor.”

“So my Mom and Dad are super-duper-super hippies. I was actually born on a commune in eastern Oregon where we like made our own clothes out of hemp and stuff. As a little kid I thought it was a totally normal childhood activity to shovel horse and cow poop into buckets and take it out to spread on the fields where the older kids did the actual farm work, while the adults all got high on LSD and magic mushrooms and stuff.

That’s why my name’s Gala. Actually my full name is Gala Starlight Godslove Messina.”

I had no idea what to say to that.

Gal just nodded slightly at my total lack of reaction. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it. That and my parents don’t believe in any kind of Western medicine. It’s all herbs and crystals and stuff.

Before my older brother ran away, he told me that I’d gotten a really bad fever as a baby. I almost died. He said he convinced Mom to put me in an ice bath for a few minutes to try and get my temperature down. She was tripping at the time and thought I should be put _under the water_ as well. If Casey hadn’t been there to pull me out, I could have died.

So between the really high fever and being almost-drowned, my brain got a little messed up when I was a baby. I know I’m kind of a weirdo,” here I opened my mouth to interrupt her and tell her she was great, but she kept barreling forward, “no I do, Taylor. I’m kind of off. I’m not really sure what it is, but I’ve been told enough to know.”

I couldn’t really argue with her. Gal was a sweetheart, but she was right – she was kind of ‘off’ in that way where you knew ‘there’s something wrong with this person’ even before you talked to them. Some combination of posture, facial expression, something – on an unconscious level you just knew it. It’d never bothered me, since before I could even register anything about her at my first HAG meeting, I was already sucked into the whirlwind that was Fran and Gal’s conversation.

“I also had a little sister, who would’ve been about six now.”

Oh… the pit of my stomach fell out.

“The same thing happened to her. My parents refused to get her immunized or get her any medical treatment or whatever. She died of whooping cough when she was just a toddler. That’s what drove my parents to move back to Brockton Bay where my Gram and Grandpa live. I think they might’ve actually been kicked out of the commune, but they’ve always said they chose to move back here.”

“Gal, I’m so sorry,” I started. She waved me off.

“So, Fran, that’s why I don’t usually play with kids. Reminds me too much of playing with the kids on the farm and my little sister, and well…” here she just sort of trailed off.

We were silent for awhile, each slowly drinking our drinks.

“So!” Fran snapped out. She attempted to clap her hands sharply but it came out as a weak ‘slap’ when she had a moment of incoordination. “Shoot I was trying to clap my hands really loud there to snap the mood and suggest something but my stupid retarded muscles messed it up.”

That got a smile from Gal. Mission accomplished.

=

We spent a couple more hours noodling around on the Boardwalk, doing and talking about irrelevancies. But it was good, you know. Really good. I hadn’t spent time like that with a group of girlfriends since… well. You know.

=

**Sun 2/20/11**

Goddammit. Goddammit all to hell.

After the shitty luck I’d been having for the first year and a half of high school, I’d decided to go for the vial of Felix Felicis potion from _The Half-Blood Prince_. I figured my current insanely good luck couldn’t last. I might need a shot of Felix Felicis to have a day of perfect luck some time in the future. What if the Endbringer sirens started? Morbid, I know, but they were known to attack places that were kind of cruddy or unstable, and it was hard to get cruddier than Brockton Bay.

I took a few long, slow, calming breaths.

Okay, Taylor, okay. So you learned a very valuable lesson. The potion had started emerging from the book and I’d grabbed at it before the light faded, actually before it’d even fully emerged from the portal. I’d been _way_ too eager and when the edge of my finger touched the portal, the whole shebang fizzled.

Hence: goddammit.

I knew potions worked, and Felix Felicis was so much better than Polyjuice. How many more lessons about my power was I going to have to learn? Grrr.

I tried to get back to sleep. The kicker was I had to stay after Group tomorrow because I had a math mid-term that Mr. Leigh had to proctor for me and submit to the state education people.

=

**Mon 2/21/11**

So of course then Mr. Leigh didn’t even show up.

=

I decided that five heads were better than one, and during a lull in the group, I casually brought up: “Hey guys so there’s this game thing I’m thinking about doing and it involves having to come up with cape powers and so what my character has is the power to make items from books appear and be real. The rules are that it has to be an item, no people or animals or AI or whatever, it has to fit through a magical portal that’s the size of the book when opened, and the item has to work for normal people. So like Harry’s wand from Harry Potter wouldn’t work for my cape since he’s not a wizard. So I need help thinking of good items and was hoping you guys could brainstorm with me.”

“You’re playing a boy?” Ellis asked.

I rolled my eyes, “of course that’s what you’d focus on, Ellis. Of course.”

“Oh this sounds like fun, can we play this game, too?” Fran asked. “I want to be a Thinker with short-range precognition and…”

Gary cut her off, “whoa, slow down, Fran, let’s start with helping Taylor brainstorm.”

“Oh, you could get Hermione’s handbag. It must be sooo convenient to be able to carry around everything all at once,” Gal offered. Huh. Hadn’t thought of that. And I still had _Deathly Hallows_ available. I’d been so focused on bigger, game-changing items that a simple utility thing like a bigger-inside bag slipped my mind.

I gave Gal a big smile, “Oh that’s cool, I never would’ve thought of that, but yeah how often does cape wish, ‘if only I had _this_ thing with me’ but with Hermione’s handbag you could carry almost anything you could think of around with you.”

“Does the item work just like it does in the book?” Ellis asked, suddenly sounding serious. I bobbed my head yes.

“Sanderson’s fantasy novels have really detailed magic systems. _The Well of Ascension_ includes a little hunk of metal that, if you swallow it, turns you into an allomancer, which is a kind of wizard that has like a dozen different powers based on different metals. Just that one item would give you pretty strong Mover and Blaster powers and some low-level Master and Thinker powers as well.”

“Wow, thanks Ellis. I’ll check it out,” I couldn’t help but convey ‘that was surprisingly thoughtful of you’ in my tone, but at least I didn’t say it out loud.

“I’d go for The One Ring,” Fran mused quietly.

Whoa. What?

“Whoa. What?” I responded.

Fran smiled weakly. “Well, if your cape is bringing it to Earth Bet, then there’s not much risk for the downsides, right? There’s no Sauron here to corrupt your character, there’s no nine rings to make Ringwraiths, no seven rings to make super-greedy Dwarf lords and stuff, right? So if The One Ring were here, it’d make you invisible, make you live longer, maybe give you some low-level enhancements or whatever. I’m not sure what those names for kinds of powers were that Ellis was mentioning, but I’d bet The One Ring would be pretty sweet. Plus, sometimes it would just be nice to be invisible.”

She suddenly snapped out of the quiet, thoughtful tone, and teased: “Hey, who knew Ellis was a huge cape geek?”

That got a “pssht” from Ellis.

We talked for a few more minutes, with Gary suggesting some tech stuff from the sci-fi he liked, Ellis mentioning a sword that could cut anything from another one of those Sanderson novels, and Gal constantly trying to interject with stuff from the Maggie Holt books.

=

**Wed 2/23/11**

Mr. Leigh actually showed up on time this morning. However, he then immediately banished everyone but me from the room. He slapped a three-page printout in front of me and said I had two hours to finish the test, and then promptly fell asleep.

I was done in about twenty minutes. I poked Mr. Leigh a few times and shook his shoulder, but no dice. Shrugging, I went out into the main library area and asked Fran to go over my test with me.

It wasn’t cheating.

No really. Dumb kids cheat, smart kids check their answers.

Fran only found one mistake, but I left it there since I thought a perfect 100% would look a little fishy. The librarian was none too pleased when I asked her to hold onto it and give it to Mr. Leigh, but at least she agreed.

=

**Sun 2/27/11**

Oh, wow. It worked.

Hermione’s Handbag was just this totally normal-looking smallish purse, with cool bead patterns running along the seams and front face. Opening it, however, revealed a cavernous interior. I put all of my schoolwork in there. And then some food. And some books. Well, lots of books. The top was kind of stretchy and I was able to get it open just big enough to jam a full-sized textbook in. The weird part was that everything seemed to be fairly well-organized in there. Like I could reach my entire arm in, and feel around and all the books felt like they were nicely stacked up, the papers too. The food was all in a little pile and I could just sort of instinctively reach in and find what I needed.

Of course, Harry’s letter and wand went in there, as did the empty vial from the Polyjuice potion.

So five pulls worked, two fizzled, one went insane, two were useless mundane items, one technically ‘worked’ but was useless and painful, and one was an incredibly useful bag that would let me carry around whatever I needed for my hero work – medical supplies, extra costumes, anything.

Overall, the past two months had been a pretty slow and crappy start to my cape career, but I had a pretty clear idea how to turn that around _quickly_. At least my civilian life was going awesome.


	3. Book 1 - Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gain some, lose some.

**Book 1 – Chapter 3**

**Sun 3/6/11**

Ugh. Ugh ugh. _The Well of Ascension_ never describes how big the chunk of lerasium is, and it was way bigger than I’d been expecting. Like trying to swallow seven or eight normal pills at once. And it tasted painfully sharp and was weirdly slippery at the same time.

The pain traveled down my esophagus and finally let up once (I assume) the metal hit my stomach. I kept waiting to feel some sort of huge, revelatory change, but nothing. I’d waited until Dad was starting to get ready for bed before starting the book, since I didn’t want to chance him poking his head into my room right when the portal opened. The books had started glowing around mid-day Sunday, though, meaning my wait time was definitely closer to 6.5 than to seven days now. Which is to say, it was now Sunday evening and I should be getting to bed myself, but the excitement of having real actual super-powers was too much to overcome.

I quickly swallowed one of the pennies I’d gathered beforehand. Oh wow, there it was. A small glowing ember in my mind. Stomach. Whatever. I could sense the copper. My power didn’t tell me anything about it other than its existence, but I knew from the books that copper hid my allomancy. Not that there were any bronze mistings out there to find me, but it seemed like a nice, safe metal to try first. I burned the copper slowly, pulling on the energy and feeling… something… enveloping me. The copper burned out surprisingly quickly. Even more surprisingly, it was suddenly replaced by an even larger reserve of zinc. What the hell? The books never said anything about metals transmuting during use.

I started to panic, thinking I’d missed something crucial about Sanderson’s magic system.

Turns out I’m an idiot.

According to the internet, pennies are made of zinc with a tiny plating of copper on top of them. So yeah. Panic for nothing.

It was past midnight, but there was basically no chance of getting to sleep. This newly-minted (hah!) allomancer wanted to play with her powers.

Some quiet rummaging around in the basement found a metal file among Dad’s tools. After pilfering a couple of stainless steel forks and a cast-iron pot from the kitchen, I set to work. Carefully catching the iron and steel filings (plus some judicious shaving off an aluminum ladder hanging from a peg under the basement stairs), I created a sizeable pile of powder in the bottom of a water bottle. Given how excited I was, it was incredibly slow, boring work, but I didn’t want to take chances. I wasn’t sure where to get pewter to give me Brute durability, so if I was going to be pushing and pulling my way across rooftops, I had to be sure I didn’t run out of steel at the last moment.

I finally got what I thought was a good amount of filings and filled the bottle with water. Vigorous shaking produced this disgusting-looking slurry. I gagged down a sip. Oh god this was even worse than the lerasium. Three more blooms of power appeared. According to the Mistborn books, burning steel would let me push on any metal except for aluminum, and iron would let me pull on it. The pushing and pulling created a straight line of force between me and the object in question. So if it was firmly fastened or heavier than me, I’d be the one pushed or pulled. If I were heavier than it (or firmly fastened in place), then the object would be pushed or pulled relative to me. Fuck yeah, physics!

I remembered from the books that Vin could zip around by pushing herself up off a metal object, tugging herself forward to get some forward momentum going and then flying in a parabolic arc, either then launching in the air by pushing against the next metal object on the ground, or slowing and stopping by pushing and pulling to bleed off speed.

Lightly touching my steel reserve saw blue lines bloom out of my chest to objects all around me. Oh, right – I hadn’t remembered that being able to burn steel or iron also let the allomancer sense all of the metal objects around them. I felt like I was surrounded by a light blue transparent urchin, with hundreds of lines pointing to all the nails in the floorboards over my head and the many, many metal objects in the basement.

Whoa. That was going to take getting used to.

I scampered back up to my room to grab the pile of pennies and nickels I’d gathered, and headed into the back yard. I tossed a penny onto the ground, centered myself over it, and _pushed_ slightly.

The penny immediately sank into the soil while I remained stationary.

Oh. Duh.

I walked onto the little slab of concrete that passed for our patio and again dropped a penny and centered myself.

Push.

I shot nearly a dozen feet straight into the air and started falling back down. Fuck, fuck, fuck, quick, the penny!

I pushed as lightly as I could, only planning to slow my fall. It worked, sort of, for a second. But in the air my body had rotated slightly, so now I wasn’t perfectly centered over the penny anymore. I slowed myself a bit, but then the angle meant I was pushing the penny forward. Given how much more I weighed, the penny promptly picked up speed and just before I smacked into the ground, it shot off like a bullet.

Just as I thunked painfully down, I heard the penny whack into our neighbor’s tree.

I lay there for awhile, blinking tears away and taking stock. I’d landed badly on one foot, hurt that ankle, and then fallen forward, smacking on my knees and onto my hands. My wrists, knees, and ankle were seriously pissed at me.

Ugh. Getting my hands on some pewter couldn’t happen soon enough.

All in all, my power so far seemed exceptionally good at teaching me painful lessons and pretty awful at letting me actually have cool hero powers. Did Glory Girl or Miss Militia have to deal with this when they first got theirs?

Anyway, lesson learned: no playing around with allomancy near the house, and no flinging myself around until I had some pewter on hand to give me the durability to handle falls and regeneration to recover from screw ups.

My excitement faded with the adrenaline and I decided to do one more experiment before calling it a night. Supposedly, allomancers could simulate telekinesis by both pushing and pulling on a object at the same time. I crawled over to the grass (cold, cold!) and lay on my back. Looking up, I pulled out a nickel and very _very_ lightly pushed on it. It shot upwards, of course, and then I burned iron to pull it back to me.

Oh crap that’s fast!

Push!

Aaaand now I can’t see it anymore and it’s gone. Well, it’s just a falling nickel. Unlikely to do any real damage.

The book said that the forces connected to the allomancer’s center of mass. For what I’d just done, that seemed to be true. The nickel moved as if the force were coming more or less straight out of my belly button. But wait, that didn’t seem quite right. When I pushed on the penny and floated upwards, it wasn’t like there was a yanking or sharp point of force right in the middle of my body. It’d been like my whole body simultaneously felt an upwards force. Hmm. More mysteries. I’m sure I’d figure them out in the most embarrassing or inconvenient way possible.

I spent the next little while playing with pushing and pulling by trying to keep coins levitated stationary above my body. For my efforts I got a few pretty impressive bruises on my abdomen from pulling in too fast, and shot forty nine cents in nickels and pennies off into the sky from pushing too hard. I don’t know how long I was out there but as my stock of change ran low, I was finally getting the hang of it.

In the books, lerasium was supposed to be the single most powerful way to get allomantic abilities. The first chunk had turned this guy into the main villain, called The Lord Ruler, who gamed his powers into living for a thousand years and doing all sorts of other god-like shenanigans. I guess that’s why I was having so much trouble controlling the pushing and pulling. If my abilities were supposed to be so much more powerful than the Mistborn described in the books, it’d make sense that a really delicate touch would take time and practice.

My fatigue finally started catching up with me and I headed off to bed, remembering to burn the aluminum in my stomach to clear out all of the metal I was holding. I couldn’t remember which, but many allomantic metals are toxic, so holding them in my stomach for a long time (and certainly while sleeping overnight) was an invitation to ulcers. Or worse. Fortunately, burning aluminum would wipe all reserves, so I just had to remember to do that once the action was over.

=

**Mon 3/7/11**

Dad woke me up after what felt like five minutes of sleep. I’m not proud to admit it, but I claimed I was feeling really bad due to ‘girl problems’ and Dad backed off immediately. Heh. Was that a generational thing? An every-guy thing? A Dad thing? I mean lots of guys were doctors and they couldn’t be squeamish about periods and stuff, right?

I’d never actually played that card before and wasn’t sure it’d work, but clutching at my abdomen and groaning about pain and using the magic words ‘girl problems’ had seen Dad give a slight eye-widening, stammer out something about hoping I felt better, and immediately retreating.

I really did actually have no small amount of pain from last night’s bruising. Impressive purples and blues radiated out from a half-dozen impact points around my belly button. I showered and dressed gingerly, helped myself to way too much aspirin, and decided to just veg out for a bit. The morning news was going on about gang stuff. No shock. Something about the Nazi bastards in the Empire 88 fighting with the fake-high-class guys in The Marche over territory in a nicer part of town. Of course, nobody reported when the ABB and Archer’s Bridge Merchants tore up the Docks or other poor neighborhoods in _their_ fights, but as soon as the slightest bit of violence crept into Captain’s Hill, everyone was suddenly losing their minds.

Their reporter on the scene was out interviewing people shopping at the Boardwalk, and kept speculating that the violence might even spill into the Bay’s only really nice area.

Dummy.

There was like no chance ever that the gangs would get into a fight in or near the Boardwalk or its small beach, regardless of who claimed to control them. Everyone knew that without the Boardwalk’s shopping and the beach to swim at, and the tourism dollars they brought in, Brockton Bay would collapse. The Boardwalk even had their own little mini-gang of Enforcers who worked security. Supposedly The Marquis claimed the Boardwalk as Marche territory forever ago, but after he got captured and sent to the Birdcage, The Marche was taken over by Knight Errant and the Boardwalk had become the one hands-off area of the city for the gangs.

After whiling away the morning napping and watching epically bad daytime TV, I figured it was time to go hunting for pewter. These bruises were making moving around really painful, and I wanted pewter’s regeneration ASAP. I headed for the small strip of the Boardwalk that had a handful of antique shops and started shopping. My allowance gave me a budget with the princely sum of $100.

At the first place I stopped, the owner gave me an odd look when I asked for old pewter items made of 91% tin and 9% lead (the composition helpfully being provided by a website devoted to magic in Sanderson’s books). I decided to be a bit more subtle in the next place, and spun a story about how my Dad collected antiques made from old-school leaded pewter, anything from little jewelry boxes to figurines to tableware. Anything, really. I claimed it was some weird thing handed down from my great-grandpa and…

I could see the shop owner’s eyes glaze over in indifference.

Perfect.

I was able to pick up a couple of small pieces, which I figured should be more than enough. I ducked off the Boardwalk to a relatively secluded loading-door area in a back alley. Retrieving my file and both a full and empty water bottle from Hermione’s Handbag, I set to work. I only filed off a little bit from both pieces before deciding to test it. A quick swirl of water and a chug later, and I found myself suddenly having access to a reserve of tin and a much smaller reserve of copper.

Fuck. He’d lied to me. It wasn’t old-school leaded pewter at all. This was bad, since I had no idea what other metals went into non-leaded pewter and that stuff could very well be deadly toxic if ingested.

I chugged the rest of the water bottle, jumped up and down a few times to slosh my stomach contents around, and then stuck my finger down my throat.

Of course, it was just my luck that right as I was throwing up, the door to the loading dock opened and an older teenage girl caught me.

She got a look of concern on her face and approached.

“Hey, are you okay? You know, you don’t need to do that…” she started.

What the hell? What’s she talking about?

I wiped my mouth and started to shove the empty water bottle back into Hermione’s Handbag before catching myself. God that would’ve been bad. The bottle was way longer than the bag so it just disappearing in there would’ve caught altogether too much attention.

“Oh thanks okay I’m fine it was nothing. I just ate some bad seafood a little bit ago and I…”

I trailed off as the girl gave me a skeptical look. I must’ve been behind one of the clothing stores that tried really hard to be cool, since the girl was dressed in this weird mix of goth, skater girl, and trashy-prep that added up to nothing so much as ‘corporate-approved image of rebellion.’ The look of concern on her face was the only sincere thing I saw.

“I used to throw up, too.”

Oh.

“Oh hey no really, I’m not bulimic or anything, but thanks for your concern. I really did just eat something bad and needed to clear out my system. I’ll be… uh… going now…”

I kind of sidled away as she turned and headed back into the store.

=

After spending almost my entire budget on bits and bobs that other shop owners absolutely insisted was antique leaded pewter, I made my way home. Best to do the rest of the experimenting away from prying, if concerned, eyes.

Turns out all but one of the shop owners was lying to me. Four rounds of puking later, I finally had a nice, comfortable burn of pewter going on. The bruises healed in minutes, and I felt fan _tas_ tic. My fatigue from not sleeping well was gone. I was moving around quickly and gracefully. All that throwing up left me feeling kind of queasy but the pewter even burned that away. I’d started to get hungry by the time I got home in the mid-afternoon but that faded as well.

I know the books warned against using any given metal too much, as that could permanently change your body for the worse, and even make you an addict, forced to burn the metal or die. But damn if I didn’t want to keep this going forever.

I did have a bit of good luck, as the one piece that was actually leaded pewter was this sizeable vase. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the back yard, carefully filing down the whole thing and filling a bunch of large plastic water bottles with pewter dust.

=

Holy shit this was awesome.

I spent that night flinging myself around the city with reckless abandon. Once I got out of our little neighborhood and into a place with larger apartment and office buildings, the roof heating units provided plenty of metal to push off of. And with pewter at a constant low burn, I had the coordination and grace to almost never stumble, and the durability to shrug it off if I did.

While I told myself I was hoping to maybe stumble across a mugging or something and start being a hero in earnest, I was truthfully relieved when I managed to use up almost all of my steel and iron reserves without coming across anything untoward, or even so much as seeing another parahuman. I was just wearing street clothes and a dollar-store Zorro mask, so it probably would’ve been a little awkward anyway.

I’d filled one water bottle with a mix of iron and steel, and a separate one filled with pewter, since I wanted to be able to take drags of pewter independently of any other metal. Pewter burned _fast_ and just one night of bouncing across rooftops drained an entire bottle’s worth of filings.

=

Well, nothing’s free.

When I got home very late that night, I flared the small aluminum reserve I had to burn off the iron, steel, and pewter.

I crashed.

Hard.

I was barely able to pilot my body towards the bed to make sure I didn’t collapse right onto the floor. I was hit with overwhelming hunger (oh right, when was the last time I ate?) and a sudden deep chill, but in the race of ‘who gets to hit Taylor hardest,’ the fatigue won by a country mile.

=

**Tue 3/8/11**

I woke some time later to Dad’s concerned voice. He said something about me burning up and looking terrible. I think I convinced him to bring me soup and let me sleep for a day before calling the doctor.

=

He brought me soup.

I guess I had convinced him.

=

I spent the rest of the day sleeping and eating bland foods.

=

That night, I was able to sort of eat a real dinner with Dad, but I still fell asleep early. Like ‘bedtime for a five year old’ early.

=

**Wed 3/9/11**

God. No more burning pewter for four hours straight. Ever.

At Group that morning, everyone expressed sympathy for my illness from Monday. Well, except Ellis who felt it necessary to comment how I looked like crap.

I had a belly full of iron, steel, pewter, and aluminum. Later I’d have to figured out a way to make a single mix that would handle all my needs, but for now I was still using separate water bottles tucked away in Hermione’s Handbag. Despite my concern about the crash from over-doing it on the pewter, now that I’d felt that strength and regeneration, I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel totally safe without having it available to pull on.

Mr. Leigh was there, actually awake and doing his job for once, grading a backlog of papers and exams from everyone. He’d assigned us a discussion on how movies and TV influenced public perception of heroes, but it felt like nobody’s heart was in it. After a few false starts, the conversation died down and everybody just kind of independently did their own work. I’d never seen the Group lose coherence like that.

A few minutes into chugging along with my chemistry homework, I wrote a little note on the corner of my notebook and angled it into Fran’s line of sight. ‘Hey, why group low energy? Always like this when Mr. Leigh is more active?’

And of course Ellis noticed. And of course he had to say something. In a sing-song voice he called out, “Mister Leeeigh! The girls are passing nooo~oo~oootes!”

He grunted quietly in response. Ellis started to open his mouth again, and he looked up from the paper he was working on. “Mr. Atherson, if you interrupt me again, your atrocious paper on the War of 1812 will suddenly find itself being rated ‘unacceptable’ instead of ‘exceeds expectations.’ Do I make myself clear?”

Ellis opened his mouth and pulled in breath as if he were going to object.

“Do you really want to write that paper again, Mr. Atherson? Think very carefully about your next words.”

Ellis’s mouth snapped shut, and he turned his head back to his history book.

Holy cow I think that was more than I’d heard from Mr. Leigh, ever. I guess he really was good at playing ‘stern teacher’ when his goal was ‘I don’t wanna deal with this crap.’

After a subdued couple of hours of catching up on individual work, Fran and I decided we deserved lunch at Holy Grounds.

=

We were halfway through our sandwiches when there was a sudden, loud boom from outside. We made eye contact and wordlessly both decided it was a good idea to be somewhere else, right now. You don’t last long in Brockton Bay without learning to get _away_ as quickly as possible when anything that has the remotest chance of being a cape fight happens. I dropped some money on the table and Fran got her arms into her crutches.

We headed out to the Boardwalk and immediately saw some sort of commotion off to the north. People were running towards us, a flashes of purple beams and small bursts of flame appeared overhead.

Shit. The only pyrokinetic in the city was Lung and if he’d decided to make trouble at the Boardwalk this meant something really, really bad. He got stronger the longer he fought, and didn’t seem to care much about collateral damage. I couldn’t imagine what brought him this far south and out of his territory, but if he was fighting here, he thought whatever it was was really important, and almost certainly people were going to die. The light beams could’ve been any number of people. One of the New Wave fliers, maybe, or that Nazi girl with the lasers, or even that Ward with the emotion blasts. Whoever it was didn’t matter.

I started a very light burn of pewter as a precaution.

“C’mon, let’s get out of here,” I put my hand on Fran’s back protectively and started to guide her back into the coffee shop.

She raised one eyebrow at me, but didn’t bother actually asking a question since all of her energy and breath was going into working her crutches as fast as possible, practically hopping off the ground at each swing.

“We’ll go through the back of the shop and exit through the employee door,” I explained.

Just as we entered the shop, I saw one of the waitresses vanishing off through a door to the right, behind the counter. We approached, and I saw the door to a big walk-in freezer.

Not a bad idea, but _away_ was better than anything else, even hiding in a durable place like that. I nodded towards the employee exit, and held the door open for Fran.

I suddenly smacked into her back while trying to exit the store. She’d stopped moving. “What the hell, Fran, we need to…” I leaned my head to the side to look over her shoulder.

God _dammit_.

We’d run smack into a group of ABB. Five mooks and a cape. The cape was holding a sword, and had a white strip of cloth covering her eyes. She turned her head towards us, and I saw these two splotches of blood on the white cloth where her eyes would be. Ugh. Dragon something? Firefly? Fuck I couldn’t remember who she was, but she was dangerous and had a serious body count.

She muttered something in Chinese or Japanese or something and one of the gangers answered her. She gestured casually towards us and two guys broke off and approached. Fran froze up, shaking slightly.

I was stuck in indecision. I didn’t have a costume or a mask or _anything_ but I did have a belly full of steel, iron, and pewter. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, at least for the moment.

We were each grabbed by one of the gang members. Fran got a little caught up in her crutches for a sec, but the guy just shook her, kicked the crutches away, and then slung Fran over his shoulder. The guy approaching me just slapped his hand down on my shoulder and guided me forward.

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell? Why were they taking us hostage?! Touching my iron and steel reserves I could see blue lines heading to the waistlines for the gangers, meaning they all had guns or knives on them. We headed north a bit and then through an alley breaking up the storefronts. Just as we emerged onto the Boardwalk, we ran into a group of PRT troopers. I dialed up my pewter burn, just in case, but at this rate I was going to go through my entire supply in the next ten or fifteen minutes.

The PRT troopers all swung around, training their guns on us. At least a few of them seemed to flinch and lower the gun barrels upon seeing me and Fran as hostages. One of them shouted to let us go. In response, the cape grabbed Fran off mook #3’s shoulder and held her sword to Fran’s throat.

Shit, shit, shit. I needed to save Fran, to get her away. There had to be a way to protect her long enough to get the both of us out of here.

The PRT guys and ABB were continuing to yell at each other, the pitch and intensity rising in just seconds.

Shit.

No time to think, I dialed my pewter to full burn and gave a quick, short iron pull on the sword. The suddenness of the motion overcame Firefly’s grasp, and the sword darted towards me. My pewter-enhanced muscles had no problem breaking away from the ganger’s grip on my shoulder, and the pewter-enhanced agility let me easily dodge to the side. The sword struck the guy behind me hard. I didn’t bother to stop and see if went point or pommel first, since I was already diving towards Fran.

Several things happened all at once. Just as I was dodging her flying sword, the ABB cape reached down and grabbed Fran by the throat. The PRT guys were startled by the sudden movement and two of them started shooting containment foam at us. And I _flared_ my steel as hard as I could, pushing out on all the small metal objects around me. The cape had another sword strapped across her back.

My indiscriminate flare of steel jerked her backwards.

Her hand was still around Fran’s neck.

In all the noise, all the commotion, all the movement, I could still hear, with absolute clarity, the sickening crunch as the cape’s sudden jerking motion whipped Fran’s neck back and forth.

Oh no, no, no, no, no, _no_ , NO.

My flight collided with the cape’s side and I punched her as hard as I possibly could. Her skull practically _detonated_ under my Brute-powered fist. Blood and other… stuff… spattered everywhere.

My jump carried me out of the line of containment foam spray. In fact, my sudden steelpush flare had sent both ABB members and PRT troopers sprawling. Flying knives, guns, even belt buckles and loose change had turned our little section of the Boardwalk into bedlam.

But I hardly noticed.

I turned gently to Fran, wrapping an arm under her head. “C’mon, Fran, please, c’mon. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’ll be okay.”

She wasn’t breathing.

She wasn’t… anything.

Stillness.

Silence.

=

Containment foam.

=

**Thu 3/10/11**

I came to in a small, featureless white room. They must’ve been watching closely because just as I woke up, Armsmaster stomped into the room. A PRT agent followed him, placing a heavy-duty looking chair in the middle of the room, facing the small cot I was on.

“Taylor, how are you feeling?” he asked as he sat.

I was caught up suddenly, hearing one of the most famous heroes in America saying my name. Quickly taking stock, I realized that my allomantic reserves were entirely gone. And I felt totally fine. No soreness, stiffness, nothing.

I guess he saw it in my face, because Armsmaster didn’t wait for me to reply before talking, “Panacea took a look at you. She said you were basically fine except for really abnormally high levels of certain metals in your body. She seemed to think you should be dead based on how much iron was in you. She managed to get it out through your kidneys and then gave you a clean bill of health.”

“Um… thanks?” I replied. “My Dad…”

“Is already waiting downstairs. He knows you’re fine but I wanted to talk with you for a minute before he comes up.”

His voice seemed unusually gentle. The image of Armsmaster in the media was of a gruff, but heroic guy who spoke exclusively in declarations and absolute certainties.

“Taylor, how much do you know about how people get powers?”

“Uh, not much. Just that some people can maybe get powers from a lobe in the brain, some people never can, and usually the powers show up when you’re you…” I trailed off.

“It’s called a Trigger Event and it’s usually described as the single worst day of your life. When someone has their Trigger Event, they often don’t exactly understand their powers and can often have accidents or make mistakes that get people hurt. Given that Trigger Events are very traumatic, many people will lash out and inadvertently hurt or even kill the person responsible for the trigger.”

Oh. That’s where he was going.

“I… uh… I definitely don’t understand my power fully that’s for sure…” I hedged.

“Taylor, don’t worry. The law is remarkably forgiving about accidents around Triggers. I don’t really share this with anyone, but when I was almost exactly your age, I was stuck in a position not unlike you were in this afternoon. It was a violent confrontation that I had no power or control over, and I… I had to watch my best friend, my only real friend, get beaten to death just because some angry kids thought he was gay.

“Those of us who Trigger in response to danger to friends or family often have some of the worst Trigger Event fallout, ironically. It seems for people like us, our brains are wired to respond with overwhelming force and violence to protect those we love…” His voice faded.

I had absolutely no idea how to respond.

“We’re going to have to get an official statement from you, but from what we were able to gather from the PRT troops there and the surviving ABB gang members, this looks like an open-and-shut case of both self-defense and defense of others, combined with Trigger Event trauma. I can guarantee you neither the PRT nor the police will be pursuing any action against you. Your father has already been informed about the basics of what happened. The PRT agents are already covered by a blanket non-disclosure, and none of the ABB people knew your name. We still forced them into signing non-disclosures, though.

“Take some time, Taylor. Talk to someone who can help you, a doctor. After you’ve taken some time, come to us. There’ll be a spot in the Wards for you when you’re ready.”

I just nodded silently. It was too much. Too much.

A short while later Dad came in and crushed me with hugs and asked questions, but I couldn’t do much more than hug him back and ask him to take me home.

=

A/N:[spoiler]h/t Worm’s Finest for Dragonfly as the Thinker/Brute with the sword and the bloody-eyed cloth over the eyes. It’s fantastic and you can read it here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/316592/[/spoiler]


	4. Book 1 - Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alea iacta est.

Book 1 – Chapter 4  
Sat 3/12/11  
I didn’t wait long to give an official statement to the PRT. They sent an agent to the house Saturday morning, and I recounted events basically exactly as they happened, except saying that I suddenly felt all the metal around me when I saw the ABB cape, whose name turned out to be Dragonfly, holding a sword to Fran’s neck. Armsmaster just assumed I’d triggered in the fighting, and I wasn’t about to disabuse them of that notion.  
=  
Sun 3/13/11  
The books sang to me that morning.  
=  
I couldn’t.  
I just couldn’t.  
=  
Mon 3/14/11  
Mr. Leigh was a no-show.  
Ellis was a no-show.  
Gary and Gal and I cried a lot.  
=  
Wed 3/16/11  
The news kept going on and on about how for such a huge cape fight, there was remarkably little property damage on the Boardwalk and very few casualties.  
Fuck you, Mr. Gel Hair. Fuck you.  
=  
No mention of a new cape on the news.  
PHO wouldn’t shut up about it, however. Fortunately I wasn’t caught on camera, but the edge of the group of ABB guys was. You could see when I flared out a steelpush, as one guy was suddenly jerked hard backwards by the gun tucked into the back of his waistband. The other guy wasn’t so lucky. He’d apparently had a knife in a sheath on his hip, and had been turned at an angle from me. The push ripped the knife out of the sheath, sending him stumbling back slightly, and then rotated the knife, burying it in the top of his throat and angled up into his head. Just as he fell out of frame you could see the blood starting to fountain out of his neck.  
=  
I felt nothing.  
=  
The funeral was that Friday.  
=  
Fri 3/18/11  
Fran had a huge Catholic family. Again and again, someone came up to me and Gal and talked about how Fran used to go on and on about us, how great we were and how much she liked us.  
After the third or fourth time I just started tuning it all out. Dad sat grimly next to me, wearing a suit that had last seen daylight when Mom was being ushered into the ground. Gal and I just sat there, clutching hands fiercely.  
I saw Ellis for the first time in awhile. A traitorous part of my brain couldn’t help but notice how sexy he looked in his suit. He came alone.  
Gary showed up with his folks and two little sisters, but we didn’t really interact past some slow nods at each other when he first arrived.  
=  
The service was nice, I guess.  
As if that mattered.  
=  
I thought when my Mom died that that was the worst thing that ever happened. It was the worst thing that could happen. For a twelve year old girl to lose her mother. Mom was the center of my world. Emma and I had formed a tight binary-star pair orbiting each other, but Mom was always there, the real center. Whip-smart. Funny and loving and reliable and… everything. Then she died and it was the worst thing ever.  
But then Emma. Without my Mom there, Emma’s family became mine, even more so than Dad. Her betrayal wasn’t just losing a friend, it was losing almost my whole family. I’d thought losing my Mom was the worst thing ever but then I learned what was really the worst thing possible: betrayal. Not just loss, but loss to evil. To betrayal.  
But then last Wednesday happened. And it turns out that losing Mom wasn’t the worst. Nor was losing Emma. Instead, it was losing… well, not Fran herself. She was an amazing friend, but we had only known each other for a couple of months. But… but Fran showed me that no matter how bad things were, even after betrayal, even after the locker, there was always a future. There was always hope. A new friend, even a new group of friends, something I’d thought was an impossibility. And I loved school and friends and I had powers and a bit of money and no matter how deeply betrayal cut, there was still hope.  
And now hope had died. Why? And why? For nothing. So fucking stupid. Apparently the ABB had been taking white girls hostage because they were fighting The Marche and they thought none of the capes or gang members would act in a way that could potentially hurt the hostages. The news said they’d been looking to drive off the Enforcers and any cops or gang members that showed up and stake a claim to the Boardwalk as ABB territory.  
Instead, it was the ABB that was driven back by a response from the entire lineup of the Protectorate, the Wards, New Wave, The Marche, and even some E88 that happened to be in the area.  
All that fighting, all that loss. And why? For what? Nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing changed, except for the worse. And hope for the future died, taking my friend with it.  
=  
That night I read The Hobbit in under a half hour and pulled out The One Ring. Fran was right to suggest it; I needed fearsome and powerful artifacts and I needed things I could use to keep the rest of my friends safe. I dumped the ring in Hermione’s Handbag and went to sleep.


	5. Book 1 - Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh look! Lung fight!

**Book 1 – Chapter 5**

**Sunday 4/10/11**

I spent the next few weeks practicing with my allomancy and getting my hands on the metals I needed to use that power to the fullest. With The One Ring firmly planted on my right middle finger, all of my practice zipping around the city was done while invisible. In three weeks I only stumbled across a single crime, a carjacking in progress. I’d simply steelpushed the criminal’s gun into his chest _hard_. The victim had looked around in a panic, but quickly realized that driving away was the smartest move.

Now that Dad knew I was a cape, I decided to come clean about how allomancy worked, although I kept the rest of my power to myself. I got him to agree to pull a small chunk of money out of my trust so I could get the materials, costume, and supplies I needed. He dropped hints a couple of times about joining the Wards but didn’t push. It almost felt like things had fallen back to the way they were right after Mom died. We weren’t talking much, and Dad wasn’t pressing me about anything – schoolwork, joining the Wards, nothing.

=

After pulling The One Ring, I decided to just go full-tilt at the most powerful book I could think of. I read the Bible cover-to-cover in the course of a single long day. Slogging through the “begats” was a royal pain in the ass. My eyes skimmed over that final line, “The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” I very slowly turned to the middle of the book mulling over what I’d just read. There were plenty of swords and spears and items of all kind, but I figured what I really needed was the best Thinker power I could get. I chose the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I was long past worrying about being expelled from Eden, and figured I could use whatever knowledge it would give me.

The fruit itself was like a bigger, harder apple. It was kind of bland, all things considering. I ate it slowly, expecting revelation.

Nope. Nothing.

Guess if you’re already a fallen person who accidentally killed her friend, living in a fallen shithole city like Brockton, the forbidden fruit just kind of laughs at you and walks away.

=

Just under a week later I went back to the Lord of the Rings and powered through _The Fellowship of the Ring_. Aragon’s pendant, the Stone of Eärendil that got him the name Elessar, seemed useful. A wiki site said it provided mild regeneration, felt good, and gave an aura of nobility. All useful, especially regeneration for when pewter was running low. I kept it on under my shirt basically all the time. I dunno if Dad already thought I had some inherent nobility, because he didn’t seem to react any different when I was wearing the elfstone.

Six days later I kept moving through the series, polishing off _The Two Towers_ in a few hours. I was suddenly struck by the thought that I could protect my friends with the three elven rings of power. They weren’t evil or fallen like the other rings, so there was basically no risk, and they supposedly only provided defensive measures like concealment, healing, and so on. I flipped to the middle of the book and said, “Nenya!” in a commanding voice. The ring fairly flew out of the book and plopped down onto the dimming pages.

I slipped on Galadriel’s ring. I felt a little bit like when I was using pewter at a very low level. I paced around my room and did a few twirls and flips. Definitely smoother, more graceful. My eyesight felt sharper, and I imagined I could feel the texture of the rug under my feet more clearly. I wasn’t really sure what else it was doing. Well, plenty of time for experimenting later. Into Hermione’s Handbag it goes!

I wrapped up the series in the early hours on Monday morning, pulling out Vilya, Elrond’s ring from _The Return of the King_. I was missing Narya, Gandalf’s ring, but I thought maybe there were other books, written by Tolkien’s son or something? I’d figure it out.

After nearly a month of hard practice I was feeling really good about my allomancy. I’d had my costume custom-made with these leather pouches that rested in the small of my back, over my hips and just under my collarbone. Each had a little magnetic clasp that could open silently and inside there were three little plastic containers filled with what I’d started thinking of as my ‘power juice’ – a sludgy mix of metals that let me operate for nearly an hour at low levels or go really hard for about five minutes. Since most fights seemed to last even less than that, I figured I’d be fine. Plus the way the containers were fitted, I could grab a container and down it in seconds. Faster if I was burning pewter at the time.

The slurry was a mix of the basic allomantic metals I needed to have ready at any time. Steel to push, iron to pull, pewter for brute powers, tin for enhanced senses, zinc to enflame people’s emotions, brass to dampen them, and finally duralumin (an alloy of aluminum, copper, and magnesium) which, when burned let me flare out one other metal for an overwhelmingly powerful effect. When flaring pewter with duralumin, I’d been able to punch straight through the entire steel hull of one of the wrecks out in the boat graveyard, survive a twenty story fall without a scratch (one of my less-proud moments while steelpushing my way around the city), and heal at a pace that was probably on par with Crawler.

Finally I kept small pellets of aluminum in Hermione’s Handbag for clearing out my reserves at the end of the night.

Aside from the compartments to hold my little plastic bottles of power juice, my outfit was just matte black leather reinforced with armor plates. The plates were supposed to be some sort of ceramic. I wasn’t sure how ceramic was supposed to help stop bullets and knives. Maybe it was tinkertech? Topping it off was a tight-fitting stiff hood that kept my hair under wraps. Much as I loved my hair, it was an obvious point to grab in any fight so I needed to keep it under wraps.

I didn’t have any other compartments or whatnot, other than a spot in the middle of the small of my back where Hermione’s Handbag fit. Since basically my entire arsenal was in there, I’d made sure that compartment was both very well reinforced and that the handbag was firmly attached. I could reach behind me, shove my whole forearm in there and retrieve what I needed by feel. The longer I’d used it, the more accommodating the bag seemed to get. After a couple of months, just thinking of what I wanted meant it was almost always right at the top of the pile.

The outfit had leather gloves and boots of the same material and consistency of the rest of the outfit, and with the gloves on there was basically no chance that The One Ring would fall off. I’d gotten so used to wearing it while out (and even sometimes to sleep) that now I felt kind of weird without it on.

My one really expensive piece of gear was a tinkertech facemask. It was simple enough, able to do full-face cover, retract the bottom half if I wanted to eat or drink, change colors and transparency levels (although I just kept it at full matte black to help keep me concealed), provide infrared vision (and low-light but I’d never used it since burning tin let me see just fine in near pitch black) and tap into police bands, all being operated with simple eye-tracking controls.

It’d taken some time to convince Dad to let me spend $25,000 of my trust on just this one piece, but when I explained how important it was to secret-identity-wise to keep my whole face covered and to be able to talk to the police at a moment’s notice, he relented.

=

That night I went out patrolling, actively looking for trouble for the first time. Until now, I’d been confining my practice to totally desolate areas like the Boat Graveyard or the old Trainyards, or nice areas downtown and around Captain’s Hill. This time I was bouncing in a straight line more or less straight into the heart of ABB territory. They’d only had three capes – the two powered assassins Oni Lee and Dragonfly, and the man in charge, Lung – now they were down to two.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Just any trouble, I guess. I was burning tin at a just high enough level to let me see almost as if it were daylight. I pushed myself up using an HVAC unit, gave a single sharp pull from the unit on top of the building across the street and then pushed up hard. I flew in a parabolic arc that never stopped being thrilling. As I approached the next roof I gave a gentle push to slow myself down. A tiny flare of pewter as I landed let me roll easily, bleeding off momentum. With The One Ring on, no one could see me, but I still tried to avoid making too much noise.

I continued bouncing across roofs, heading through seedier and seedier neighborhoods. Eventually my enhanced hearing picked up sounds of a large number of male voices and the unmistakable metallic click of guns being loaded. Or cocked. Or whatever you called it when you slide back that top part to get a bullet ready and it snaps back into place.

I came to rest on a roof and slowly turned up the tin. I had to be careful, because tin wasn’t selective – it simply turned up the sensitivity of all input, all at once. With practice, I was beginning to learn to focus only on certain information – just my ears or just vision. It was still distracting as hell, though, because my sense of touch got turned up, so I started feeling every little imperfection in my clothes.

The voices in the building across the street were a babble of languages, none of them English. This was promising. A quick reach into Hermione’s Handbag produced a number of metal slugs about the diameter of quarters but double the thickness. I was still trying to find a good balance between mass and shape that would let me shoot someone hard enough to stop them without killing them outright.

Eventually the men all filed out into the street. I could see their tattoos and gang colors clear as day. My steel reserves showed me faint blue lines leading to each of them, indicating that each was carrying a gun or knife. They stood around saying not much waiting. Eventually, they were joined by this tall, incredibly muscled guy covered in dragon tattoos and wearing a very simple metal mask.

Lung.

He started commenting in a mix of Japanese, Chinese, and maybe Vietnamese before lapsing into his heavily-accented English. My attention wandered for a moment, trying to figure out if I flared duralumin and steel, could I simply push the mask through his head hard enough to kill him immediately. My focus snapped back to what he was saying when he said something about children, “…the children, just shoot. Doesn’t matter your aim, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure. We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?

The gathered men gave a murmur of assent.

Wait, they were going to kill _kids_?

=

A/N:[spoiler]Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.[/spoiler]


	6. Book 1 - Chapter 6

**Book 1 – Chapter 6**

**Sunday 4/10/11**

I took a long, low breath.

Think for a second, Taylor. Think.

They obviously don’t mean _kids_ kids, we’re in the middle of a super-crappy area of the docks and it’s late at night. It’s not like they’re going to a preschool to murder a bunch of toddlers. And the way Lung was talking about them being clever sounded more like rivals than kids.

I decided to follow along. Although I made a bit of noise rushing through the air, by always holding myself up at least a bit I had no footsteps, and even without The One Ring, my costume would’ve rendered me near-invisible up here on the rooftops.

I didn’t have long to wait. Not fifteen minutes after Lung started heading down the street, the group was suddenly attacked. Darkness billowed out, coating much of the battlefield. Three enormous lizard monster things crashed down into the street. Even safely perched three stories up, resting silently and invisibly on a column of steelpush force, I felt a spike of fear. Holy shit those things were terrifying.

I regretted not doing more research on the capes operating in Brockton Bay. Giant lizard monsters sounded like something I should absolutely know about. I mean, this wasn’t New Wave or the Protectorate, I was sure. None of the hero groups I knew about had darkness and lizard monsters. Which made it a fair bet I was watching a villain-on-villain fight. Hanging back and just observing was starting to look like a good option.

The darkness roiled like a living thing, opening pockets here or there. Fire spurted up out of the darkness periodically and Lung was growing, his power ramping up so quickly his head kept poking out of the top of the darkness before whoever was controlling it could cover him again.

Everything was oddly muted. I would’ve expected a cape fight to be much noisier. Maybe the darkness?

After less than a minute, the darkness pulled back revealing a section of the street. It was strewn with the bodies of the ABB gangers that had been with Lung. I wobbled and fell to the roof, thunking onto my knees in shock. It was a slaughterhouse down there. Bodies were charred – Lung didn’t seem to care about hurting his own men when he was flinging fire around. Many looked literally chewed up, and less then half of the people present were able to get up and start running or hobbling away.

I had to do something. I hopped off the edge of the roof, using a light ironpull on the metal bars over the third-story windows to swing me close to the building and slow my fall.

Just when my feet touched down, all of the darkness seemed to fade at once. Cranking tin up slightly, I took in the entire scene in a glance. Lung was there, huge and scaled in silver, flames dancing across his body. A body in black leather and a motorcycle helmet lay on the ground. Two of the lizard monsters were down, almost certainly dead given how many pieces they were in. A girl in jeans and wearing a dollar store dog mask screamed in incoherent rage when she saw what’d happened to the lizard monsters and started running at Lung.

He casually backhanded her, sending her tumbling back up the street. Unless she was a serious brute, she probably hadn’t survived.

There were only two of them left that I could see. A blond girl in a purple and black outfit, and a boy in a frilly white renn fair outfit. The boy made a couple of weird frantic gestures that did nothing. The two of them shot each other a look and turned to run, taking advantage of the brief moment that Lung’s attention was directed at finishing off the final lizard monster.

They didn’t get very far.

He took a step forward, raising his hands and gathering the flames.

So many dead… I had to stop this.

Lung worked on anger, right? Or danger or bloodlust or something? It was definitely emotional?

No time to wonder, I had to act. I flared duralumin and pushed out my entire reserve of brass, seeking to dampen not just anger but all emotion. In everyone.

I felt a slight wobble as the duralumin and brass _spiked_ out in a fraction of a second.

Behind me I heard several thumps that sounded like people falling down. The two younger villains fell to the ground instantly, looking like someone had just flipped the off switch in their brains.

Lung wobbled, staggered, and fell to one knee. The silver scales retracted back into his skin. In only a few seconds, he shrank and reverted entire to his normal human frame. He shook his head like a confused animal and flopped over onto his side.

I approached slowly.

After just a few footsteps, his head whipped towards me, confusion still writ large across his face. His eyes were unfocused, his mouth moving wordlessly.

I was pretty damn sure none of my zip tie handcuffs would hold him. Did I even want to hold him? This fucker was the one fundamentally responsible for…

But could I blame him for my fuck up? My total incompetence that robbed me of my friend? Robbed the world of Fran’s light?

The sense of loss immediately flared into anger. For just a moment, I thought I could feel The One Ring pulse on my hand.

Huh – my power was helping me out. I didn’t have anything that could physically subdue Lung unless I wanted to just execute him now, but my power clearly knew The One Ring could do something.

I lay my hand on Lung’s chest. In his dazed state, he did little more than crane his head up slightly and try to look at what the invisible source of pressure on his chest was.

My mind dived into The One Ring, trying to feel it. To feel its power and then to stretch out into Lung. I thought about how, in the book, Sauron used the ring to dominate the Ringwraiths, and to twist and control the minds of the dwarves. My eyes snapped open and looked right into Lung’s. The bewildered look on his face faded and he made direct eye contact with me.

SUBMIT.

I pushed as hard as I could.

SUBMIT.

His eyes flickered, showing surprise.

SUBMIT.

The surprise turned to anger. He stirred slightly.

SUBMIT.

A spark of pyrokinetic fire flickered ever so slightly above his head, and his hands stopped twitching pointlessly.

SUBMIT.

I cast my mind back to Winslow. I needed to be angry. I needed my will to overcome his. Having completely slammed down all of his emotions with brass, I was at a huge advantage, but still… this was _Lung_.

I tried to recall every insult, every betrayal. Every failure by the teachers to help, by Dad to do anything after Mom died.

My mind fixed on the last image I saw before being shoved in _there_. A half-glimpse of part of Emma’s face, eyes filled with cruelty and pleasure.

 **SUBMIT**.

Lung’s head thunked back down on the concrete. His body went completely still.

I was suddenly assaulted by images from Lung’s mind… so much fighting… an endless sea of violence. An adult lifetime defined by anger, battle, pride, and unending violence.

I gasped, pulled my hand back and almost unconsciously jerked myself away with a quick ironpull to a broken streetlight behind and above me. I used up the last of my pewter to land smoothly and get myself settled. One of the things I’d notice about pewter – the fact that it made the body a perfect, gracefully functioning machine also helped smooth out fear, worry, or other negative emotions.

Now wasn’t the time to get philosophical about psychology. Now wasn’t the time to be _completely fucking freaked out_ about my sudden bout of mind-reading.

Lung looked to be down for the count, so I needed to see to everyone else. I grabbed my burner smartphone and called it in to the PRT emergency line. I told them it was a villain fight and to send someone right away.

“Miss, are you currently in danger?”

“No, everyone’s down.”

“Excuse me?”

“Lung is lying unconscious in the street and the villains with the darkness and lizard-things are gone. Well two are gone and two I think are dead. A whole bunch of ABB guys are dead or wounded badly I need to check them out. I only have basic medical supplies.”

“Miss, are you a cape?”

Well, hell. I’d done so much planning and practicing on how to use my powers and my costume and the gear I’d need to be able to deal with anything, and I’d never actually stopped to consider the most basic questions – what was my heroic identity going to be? What powers would I use in that identity? No way was I telling _anyone_ my true power, since they’d immediately try to kill or kidnap and brainwash me, trying to get God-tier items out of books. After a moment, I replied:

“Yes I’m a cape. My name is ghost. Please tell your guys that I’m an independent hero, but that I’m invisible. I can’t turn visible. So if they see stuff floating around, just talk to me and please don’t shoot me.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. “Sure thing, Miss, you should…”

I could hear a motorcycle off in the distance. I’d completely fucked up tonight by not doing my homework on the cape scene in Brockton, but I sure knew about Armsmaster’s motorcycle. PHO was full of people trying to get pictures as he blew past, or of the occasional lucky person who could get a selfie with it when it was parked somewhere.

“I hear Armsmaster coming. I have to go now, some of these people really look hurt.” I hung up on the operator who was apparently still trying to keep me on the line.

The closest person to me was the guy in black leathers. The whole front of his jacket was coated in blood and there were a couple of huge gashes in his abdomen. I wrestled his helmet off. No pulse. No breathing.

No time to freak out.

I jogged past Lung’s body over to where there were ABB guys sprawled all over the street. The first two I checked were dead, but the third guy was alive. I guess my flare of brass must’ve knocked him out. Checking him over, he seemed to have miraculously gotten out of it with no more injury than a nasty cut on one arm. At least I couldn’t see any other blood or obvious wounds, and both his pulse and his breathing seemed fine.

I grabbed a roll of gauze, some tape and a bottle of antiseptic. I’d watched a bunch of first aid videos and read a bunch of books but I didn’t really think I had time for careful technique. I just spurted a bunch of the betadine onto the guy’s arm, roughly lifted it and then wrapped the entire roll of gauze around it. I tried to tear off a piece of medical tape but it ended up getting stuck on my glove, and then adhesive then got all wrapped on itself and soon I had this whole tangle of medical tape stuck to my hand.

A voice barked out behind me, “Ghost!”

I jerked in surprise and half-fell sideways. To my tin-enhanced hearing, it felt like the shout was a bullhorn right night to my ear.

I dialed the tin way down.

Holy crap it was dark.

Oh, hey, low-light vision in my swanky Toybox mask.

I pushed myself back into a kneeling position and continued fussing with the medical tape while calling out, “Over here! I’m trying to bandage this guy.”

Heavy footsteps behind me. The footsteps paused. With the very low-level burn of tin I had going, I was able to hear the slightest bit of metallic noise and a soft wuff of air, followed by what sounded like some sort of gloppy liquid spattering around. The footsteps continued towards me.

“Medical personnel are en route and will be here in less than ten minutes.”

In frustration, I just kind pushed the ugly mass of adhesive tape over the gauze and shook my hand to get it loose.

“Do you have medical training? You could do more harm than…”

I turned to him and stood slowly. “Just a bit of first aid. C’mon we gotta check the rest of these guys they may not have ten minutes. I have a small sack of medical supplies…”

“That won’t be necessary,” he interrupted. “This halberd model has a full suite of on-board supplies.”

In the end, our efforts didn’t seem to matter much. Fully half of the gang members there were already dead from either burns or attacks by the lizard monsters. The other half were simply unconscious from my brass flare and none had immediately life-threatening wounds. Armsmaster kept glancing over towards me while I was wrapping another cut on a guy’s leg. I guess seeing betadine squirt out of nowhere and gauze fly around in the air while a young female voice cursed quietly to itself was something of an odd sight, even by Brockton Bay’s standards.

“I haven’t heard of you before now, Ghost. Are you new?” Armsmaster asked.

“Yeah, first night out.”

He gave a quick look around the devastation on the street.

“I know, I’m just lucky I guess,” I replied.

“We’ll need a statement and a way to get in touch with you.”

I gave him the number for the burner I’d used to call it in.

“I wasn’t involved in the fight, really. I was just walking around when I stumbled on Lung and his guys. Obviously I wasn’t worried about being seen, so I just hung out and listened. I couldn’t understand the Chinese or whatever but then Lung said something about killing kids so I figured I should tail them and call it in.”

“Good idea. Lots of new capes would’ve tried to jump right in without stopping to think.”

I nodded acknowledgement of the compliment and continued, “So turns out the kids he was talking about was this villain group with lizard monsters and some sort of darkness generation.”

“That’s the Undersiders. A slippery group of villain thieves. We know almost nothing about them and until now, they’ve always gotten away. The monsters and darkness were from Grue and Hellhound,” here he waved casually up the street. “With their deaths, we’ll have to be careful. We don’t know anything about the identities or powers of the other members, but we suspect either Tattletale or Regent is a Thinker, quite possibly a powerful one. With their Thinker still at large, the group may well escalate hard against the ABB.”

“What? They’re not at large, both of them are lying unconscious right over there,” I started to gesture towards the mouth of the alley they’d been trying to flee to before I put everyone down.

His head whipped around in the direction of my gesture but dialing the tin up and looking, I saw them both gone.

“Oh.”

“Like I said, slippery. They must’ve fled while you were seeing to the wounded.” Or dominating Lung, I thought to myself.

I let him know that I didn’t have any other real information about the fight or the Undersiders powers.

“How did the fight end? And what can you tell me about your powers?”

Ah. Okay. What did I have to reveal?

“I’m a grab-bag with a very minor brute power that I can switch on for short times. I’m invisible, as you can see.. or well, I mean… _not_ see. I’m kinda stuck this way right now but I’m sure I’ll figure out…”

Thank god I was invisible. Between my stumbling over my words and the damn medical tape thing, if I’d had to deal with Armsmaster looking right at me, I’d’ve crumpled into a puddle of embarrassment by now.

“… oh and I’m like that Ward Gallant with the emotion blasts. Well, not blasts, I mean. I have a short-lasting kind of area emotion control.”

I thought I could see Armsmaster stiffen slightly at that.

Fuck.

Admitting to a Master power was a serious mistake.

“And that power is how you were able to subdue Lung?”

“Uhhh… that was actually kind of accident. I was really freaking out at all the dead people, and Lung was about to blast one of the Undersiders with another flame burst and I just pushed as hard as I could to dampen all emotions in everyone.”

He glanced around again.

“Yeah, I know, crazy, but I know for a fact I can’t do _that_ again right now,” a bit of misdirection since I absolutely could if I slugged some power juice to replace my duralumin. But Armsmaster was already looking kind of tense and I didn’t want him thinking I could just casually knock him out. I continued, “I’ve never done anything like that before but I needed to shut down Lung’s rage or whatever fueled his power. I pushed so hard it knocked out everyone but Lung, and even he shrunk back down almost immediately and collapsed.”

“Don’t sound sorry, Ghost. What you’ve done here is remarkable. Lung has been a blight on this city…”

I missed the end of what he said. Armsmaster. Calling me remarkable. Damn skippy.

“… and you’d go very far in the Protectorate. The city could certainly use more heroes.”

“Oh. Wow, um thanks but I’d have to join the Wards and right now I’d really rather stay independent.”

A frown flashed across his face for an instant. He immediately hid it, however, and gave what looked very much like ‘official smile #4’ while holding out his card. He couldn’t hide the twitch as I took it from his hands.

Hm. I guess I hadn’t realized how freaky invisibility would be for other people. That and I told him I had a Master emotion-manipulating ability.

‘Christ. Of all the powersets you could’ve revealed, Taylor, you basically picked the worst possible,’ I thought bitterly. Stranger and Master abilities in a new, unknown, and untested cape.

They were gonna arrest me first excuse they got.

“Thanks, I’ll definitely call if I change my mind. Believe me, I know the stats on new capes, especially new independent heroes. But, my power lends itself pretty well to staying out of the way and acting subtly.”

For a third time, Armsmaster shot his eyes in a glance around the street.

Oh c’mon. Fucking hell. None of this was my fault, lack of subtlety or otherwise.

“So, uh, did you need me for anything else or…”

“No and once again, thank you for the service you’ve done to the city, Ghost. Please be careful out there, tonight especially.”

I paused at that. I guess he picked up on the sudden stillness in my footsteps.

“Something in the air, maybe. I don’t know. But we had a huge blowup between the Empire and the Merchants across town, Circus making a huge show of wrecking and robbing a jewelry store, a fire in some brownstones downtown, reports of odd…” he caught himself and shook his head.

“Well, with Lung in custody, it’ll all be worth it,” he finished, sounding like he was trying really hard to find a silver lining to the insanity going on around the city tonight.

=

I could hear the TV news playing in our house from halfway across the back yard. I opened the back door and immediately called out to Dad, pulling off my glove and removing The One Ring. He came barreling into the kitchen, wrapping me in a huge hug.

“Erf… Dad…” I pretended to gasp for breath.

He let me go, adjusted his glasses and gave me a watery smile.

“Honey, please tell me you weren’t caught up in any of the insanity that’s been going on out there.”

I detached the mask and flopped into a chair at the kitchen table. Physically, I felt totally fine. The pewter burn faded, leaving me feeling tired and hungry, of course, but other than that I was okay. Mentally…

“I’m fine, Dad, totally fine. I just stayed on the rooftops out of the way. With my costume and the enhanced vision from the mask, there was basically no chance anyone would see me, or could even keep up with me if I decided to run away.”

That wasn’t exactly true. With all the practice I’d been doing, I could easily get up to highway speeds while bounding across the city, but fliers like Purity or Glory Girl could outpace me.

“But…”

He shot me a glare. “But _what_ Taylor? What happened.”

I couldn’t help the smile, “Dad, I took down Lung.”

Dad’s mouth opened, and he was clearly about to yell in surprise and anger rather than praise.

“Dad! Don’t worry. He literally never saw me. Remember the emotion-dampening I told you about, with brass? So Lung’s power requires him to be ramped up with aggression. I just completely shut off his anger and aggression and he flopped over like a rag doll.”

I gave him an edited version of the night’s events, and he seemed to think I should take up Armsmaster on his offer.

“Honey, I know you can’t really trust the government, and I know you’ve heard me complain about how the PRT is just another better-funded gang, but they’ll help keep you safe… you need a group to watch your back, kiddo, nobody should be going it alone,” he trailed off seeing the expression on my face.

“Yeah, okay. Okay. I give. Annette used to get _that_ look and I could never…” he shook his head slightly. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I was scared all night and I wanted to call, but I didn’t want a ringing phone to suddenly give you away if you were hiding and I couldn’t think of what to do…”

I reassured him as best I could and we both headed off to bed. I’d definitely earned a good night’s sleep.

=

The next morning, the news announced that according to an anonymous PRT source, a clash between Lung and the Undersiders resulted in the death of two villains in the Undersiders.

And Lung.


	7. Book 1 - Interlude 1: Plans and Consequences

**Book 1 – Interlude 1: Plans and Consequences**

 

**Piggot**

“Come in.”

Colin Wallis, Armsmaster when in costume, walked stiffly into my office. For all that he was a model Protectorate member, the man had an infuriating habit of treating non-parahumans both at the Protectorate and PRT as little more than interchangeable cogs. I always got the slight sense that he was talking down to me, and it wasn’t his inherent Tinker chauvinism. Thus my abrupt summoning of him to my office seemed to get his hackles up.

“Director, I submitted the preliminary report while en route, and was planning to provide a full write up while submitting myself to Level 1 M/S protocols following an encounter with a non-hostile but unknown…”

I cut him off: “Lung is dead.”

I’d seen the man angry. I’d seen him impatient, and I’d seen him crowing with arrogant self-satisfaction after what he thought of as a job well done. But I’d never seen him completely, utterly shocked.

He opened and closed his mouth a few times, seemingly unable to even formulate a response.

“Your preliminary report made mention of a new Master cape who had emotion control so powerful she knocked out an entire group of villains all at once?”

He weakly nodded.

“And when your report then mentions that you ‘subdued Lung’ I assume that means you then used your new untested tinkertech tranquilizer on Lung?”

That finally got a response out of him. “Director, the tranquilizer is _not_ untested. It was already approved for omega-stage human testing scheduled for later this morning and would’ve gotten final field approval by tomorrow afternoon…”

Of course that’s what he’d react to. The tiniest slight to his tech and the man got insufferable.

Wait.

Did he just say…

“Are you telling me you field-deployed a tinkertech drug _before_ final field approval?”

That shut him up, hard.

“You’ve just dumped a very, very large mess in my lap, Colin. I’ll do what I can, but the higher ups are almost certainly going to demote you. If you’re able to avoid prosecution for homicide with a parahuman power, you’ll be a long time rebuilding.”

I was, perhaps, overplaying my hand slightly. A hero as renowned as Armsmaster wouldn’t face actual criminal consequences, even if he did kill a man using unapproved tinkertech. He was far too buried in worry to notice, though.

“Director, I…

“It must’ve been an unintended power interaction with the new cape’s…”

He trailed off when he saw the look on my face.

“Director, I’m going to go submit myself to M/S quarantine for the next six hours while I complete my full report and… reflect on the situation.”

I caught myself before giving out a snort of dismissal. “Very well. I’ll keep the hounds at bay while I await your report. We can delay news of Lung’s death getting out for probably two to three days, but by then Costa-Brown will insist on a full court press to celebrate taking down such a powerful A-class threat.”

=

**PRT/PRO INTEROFFICE MEMORANDUM**

**Form NPPE-001: INITIAL ENCOUNTER AND PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT**

**FILING NUMBER: 3201139**

FILED BY: ARMSMASTER, PROTECTORATE ENE

SENT TO: OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR ENE

cc: EMILY PIGGOT, REBECCA COSTA-BROWN, OFFICE OF THREAT OVERSIGHT, LEGAL AFFAIRS OFFICE, YOUTH GUARD LIASON OFFICE, THINKER TEAM SIX – PRT/PRO INTERACTIONS, WEGDG ANALYSIS UNIT FIVE – NEW ENCOUNTERS

DATE INCIDENT: 2011-03-10

DATE FILED: 2011-03-10

PROTECTORATE MEMBERS INVOLVED: Armsmaster

INITIAL ENCOUNTER SUBJECT: Hebert, Taylor (see file #32011012 Re: Case Summary and Settlement Payment #95118)

PRELIMINARY THREAT ASSESSMENT:

Brute 4: Subject demonstrated ability to punch a human skull and shatter it on impact.

Shaker 3 (sub: Blaster 2): Subject demonstrated metallokinesis ability. Limited to a straight-line push with force vector originating at subject’s center of mass.

 

Executive Summary:

 

Taylor Hebert was caught up in a gang fight between the Asian Bad Boys (ABB) and The Marche (report summary #320996) in the Boardwalk region of Brockton Bay. The ABB took Hebert and her friend Frances Weathers hostage. Upon encountering a group of PRT field agents, ABB parahuman Dragonfly (dossier #320603) threatened Weathers’s life. It is believed at this time or just before then that Hebert experienced her trigger event. The earlier incident that lead to settlement payout #95118 was believed to be a potential trigger, but at that time Miss Hebert denied having powers and a diagnostic scan with my armor’s medical unit (tinkertech schematic #CW668213 and capability summary #741963) revealed a pollentia but no corona gemma.

In an attempt that was partially caught on camera (file #V3207814), Taylor leapt at Dragonfly while pushing away all metallic objects around her. This force caused the deaths of two ABB gang members and injuries to four PRT troopers, none greater than class 2 (medical report summary #NFI3206788). In response, Dragonfly wrenched Weathers’s neck, causing a fatal spinal injury at C2-C4.

Hebert saw her friend die and responded by punching Dragonfly in the head, immediately causing massive trauma to Dragonfly’s skull and brain, resulting in instantaneous death. Hebert then fell into a stupor.

She was retrieved and brought into PRT custody, her injuries seen to by Panacea (#NFI32011109614). I had a brief conversation with Taylor. I assessed her as being unsuitable for Wards recruitment in the wake of her friend’s passing, but had a lengthy conversation with Daniel Hebert (conversation recording #A320871463) explaining that Taylor would be safe with us and a valuable member of the Wards when she was ready to join.

Legal ramifications should be minimal, as Hebert used her powers in defense of herself, her friend, and the PRT troopers, and her attack on Dragonfly is an acceptable level 2, class 4 use of a parahuman power immediately following TE. (legal department executive summary #LL32096871).

=

**PRT/PRO INTEROFFICE MEMORANDUM**

**Form NPPE-001: INITIAL ENCOUNTER AND PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT**

**FILING NUMBER: 3201142**

FILED BY: ARMSMASTER, PROTECTORATE ENE

SENT TO: OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR ENE

cc: EMILY PIGGOT, REBECCA COSTA-BROWN, OFFICE OF THREAT OVERSIGHT, LEGAL AFFAIRS OFFICE, YOUTH GUARD LIASON OFFICE, THINKER TEAM SIX – PRT/PRO INTERACTIONS, WEGDG ANALYSIS UNIT FIVE – NEW ENCOUNTERS

DATE INCIDENT: 2011-04-10

DATE FILED: 2011-04-11

PROTECTORATE MEMBERS INVOLVED: Armsmaster

INITIAL ENCOUNTER SUBJECT: Ghost

PRELIMINARY THREAT ASSESSMENT:

Stranger 4: Subject demonstrated complete invisibility in the UV/visible spectrum of light. Subject was visible on IR/thermal imaging.

**Note all remaining assessments are self-reported/unverified and recommend standard high-priority outreach and power testing and verification

Shaker 3 (sub: Master 2): Subject claimed to have an area of effect ability to manipulate emotions. Subject claimed an over-stressed use of this power with the goal of dampening all emotions was enough to incapacitate Lung (dossier #3206654) and nine other non-parahumans.

Brute 1: Subject claimed to have a minor Brute rating that could be temporarily activated.

Tinker 0*: Subject made no reference to Tinker abilities but scans (file #320654987) indicated the presence of two Tinker items: one mid-level item whose placement suggests a tinkertech mask and one top-level item that is most likely a portable access point to a pocket dimension. Other observed parahuman abilities may all be the result of tinkertech.

 

Executive Summary:

 

While returning to patrol after dealing with a jewelry store break-in by the parahuman Circus (file #3206655881), I was notified about an ongoing conflict between Lung and unknown parahumans. Shortly after setting out, Console informed me of a friendly on-site, cape name Ghost, who called in the incident.

Upon arrival, scans showed the parahuman Lung unconscious, and the presence of ten dead people and nine living but incapacitated ones. Two of the deceased have been identified as Grue (dossier #320159753) and Hellhound (dossier #320985236). Several large chunks of initially unidentifiable flesh were present, tentatively classified as the remains of Hellhound’s dogs. The remaining deceased were all identified as members of the Asian Bad Boys (ABB) (file #320552134)

Upon arrival, I witnessed one of the survivors having a wound bandaged. The person providing medical care was invisible, but as soon as the antiseptic was sprayed onto the arm, it became visible. The gauze and medical tape similarly became visible upon being applied to the survivor. Audio recordings (see #A32012357) suggest Ghost was retrieving medical supplies from a kit being carried at her side or on her back. Ghost expressed concern about providing immediate medical care to the wounded, and voice analysis (file #320857156) suggests sincere concern and a high level of stress about further loss of life.

Full video (#V32085714) audio (#A32069887) and transcripts (#320123987) are available from helmet cam. Throughout the discussion, Ghost was polite, concerned, and truthful, as near as could be assessed without visual inputs (see tinkertech device recording #CW556914).

Audio analysis suggests teenage female between the ages of 14 and 16. I suggested she would made a fine Protectorate hero to flatter the teenager, at which point she said she would need to join the Wards and was not interested at this time. She displayed maturity in understanding the dangers of remaining independent, and in her earlier decision to follow Lung rather than immediately engage him (see timestamp 05:39 in file #A32012357).

In light of her confessed Master and Stranger abilities, I submitted myself for a level 1 M/S screening upon returning to headquarters. Full audio analysis (#A3209658) and behavioral estimations (#PSY6587131) are available.

As with all heroic-inclined minor parahumans, high priority should be given to outreach and recruitment into the Wards.

=

I finished skimming through Colin’s various reports and flicked on the audio-only recording of his encounter with Ghost.

Oh.

Oh god _dammit_.

I couldn’t expect Colin to have noticed. He saw the case with the Hebert girl as little more than an irritating speed bump in his career, and didn’t do anything past tinkering up a few minor changes to behavioral analysis software. One of our Wards tortures a girl in what could have been a trigger event with a whole school looking on and doing nothing, and all he cares about is a failure of his tech to spot antisocial tendencies.

But I’d listened to the tapes. The tapes where Hebert described in excruciating detail the various horrors she’d been subject to. If I were being honest with myself, I listened to two particularly awful bits many more times than was strictly necessary.

This was my failure. Mine. My entire existence at the PRT is to provide the oversight necessary to keep parahumans in line and in this case, I’d failed spectacularly.

Power corrupts all of us, and parahumans are given power beyond any reasonable measure. It was axiomatic, then, that parahumans were fundamentally corrupt. In some, like Battery, the corruption was almost imperceptible. In others, like Armsmaster, it was obvious but directed into legal channels. And in most the corruption drove them straight to personal gain through crime.

Having heard Taylor’s recorded voice many times before, I recognized it immediately in the recording of Ghost.

This night just kept getting worse.

=

**Emma Barnes**

I should die.

I deserved to die.

Daddy may have pulled every string he had to get me on home confinement and community service instead of going to juvie, but I didn’t care.

I’d thought I was strong. A survivor. Instead, I died in that alley. Emma died. I was just some gross walking corpse propped up by Sephora makeup and Sophia’s hatred.

I’d been getting through this. I’d been making it and finding a new balance. Sophia’s sudden and totally unexplained disappearance wasn’t so unexplained to me. I never did rat on her, but I’m sure they found her lethal bolts and dug up whatever they needed to drag her away forever.

But then today happened. I’d managed to weasel my way into some me time on the boardwalk while doing my community service city “beautification” work. Mostly I just had to wear this totally disgusting bright orange shirt while picking up cigarette butts.

And there she was.

Taylor. My sister. My best friend. The girl I betrayed and thought I hated and who was just so fucking pathetic. She was sitting there at a table at the front window of Holy Grounds with this absolutely gorgeous blond boy and a little kid with crutches. I couldn’t… I just didn’t know what to think. Was she doing some sort of volunteering with the crippled kid? She looked so happy and kept stealing these little glances at that unbelievably hot guy.

I should’ve been at that table. It should’ve been me sitting there with her, laughing and sharing some inside joke, sharing those little things that you could only know if you’d known someone your whole life, practically lived with them… if you loved them.

Instead I’d spit on all of it. Our entire history, I set fire to it and used it as a petty, pointless weapon.

=

Mom wouldn’t speak to me at all anymore. If she had something to say, she’d go “Alan, please tell _your daughter_ that she needs to take out the trash.”

As much as Dad and Mr. Hebert had been the friends that brought our families together, it’d been my Mom and Taylor’s Mom that had become really close. Almost as close as Taylor and me. When she found out what I’d done, when she heard some of the stories Taylor said – it was bad. Then, and I don’t know how she ever found out, she heard about that time in the middle of the fall semester when I’d told Taylor that… that… that it was good her Mom was dead so she didn’t have to see what Taylor…

That was six weeks ago and Mom hasn’t spoken a single word to me since.

=

Dad is making me see a shrink. It’s so fucking stupid.

=

I filled my bathtub and pulled my hair dryer out of the closet.

It would be better this way.

=

**Tattletale**

Regent was shaking my shoulder. My head was somehow throbbing but felt completely deadened at the same time. My power helpfully supplied that I’d just been mentally attacked.

Thanks, power. I blinked my eyes open.

[ _emotions deadened, heart rate abnormally slowed, Alec less affected due to flattened affect_ …]

I cut my power off and glanced over the street. Lung flopped onto his back. All the other ABB mooks were laid flat-out. I could hear footsteps, but not see anyone.

[ _invisible person, the one who put us all down_ ]

Ugh. A baby step closer to a Thinker headache for obvious information. I heard the footsteps approach Lung. A shifting noise – either the invisible parahuman was kneeling down next to or on Lung.

[ _Master power, not a parahuman, dominating Lung’s mind, powerful, very powerful, not a parahuman, potentially class S powerful_ …]

I cut my power off. When it started throwing off hysterical information like class S threats and insisting that the Master wasn’t a parahuman, it was time to stop Thinking and start getting right the hell out there.

Regent helped me lever myself up and we staggered our way down the alley as quietly as we could.

[ _Master completely engrossed in dominating Lung’s will, not hearing us, not a parahuman_ ]

I hissed to Regent, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” At Regent’s pause I pulled him forward and insisted intensely, “Brian and Rachel are dead. The boss fucking sold us out on this attack at the ABB. We need to get out of town _right fucking now_ …”

Regent simply nodded and picked up the pace. He may not have had much loyalty to anyone other than himself, but it meant he would accept the idea of being double-crossed by the boss without hesitation or surprise.

We moved as fast as we could.

=

**Coil**

“Mr. Pitter, please see that our newest guest is settled and that she’s made comfortable.”

=

More than satisfactory.

=

I collapsed the final split covering the evening’s operations and decided to check in on the Undersiders. They were all expendable, a fair trade in acquiring tonight’s asset, but if Tattletale could be brought in tonight would go from merely successful to an unequivocal triumph.

In one timeline, I sent Team Foxtrot to the Undersiders’ base to await their return. In another, I sent them to track down the encounter site. This second timeline saw Foxtrot go completely radio-silent after reporting an initial engagement between Lung and the Undersiders. Hm. Worrying.

I collapsed and re-split. In one: “Foxtrot, abort current target. Say again, abort. Locate encounter site between Uniform Sierra and Lima, maintain maximal possible distance.”

Hm, that’s better. This time Foxtrot was able to pick up Tattletale and Regent after the fight. Grue and Bitch didn’t survive Lung’s ministrations. Ah well. I had them execute Regent, torch the Undersiders’ base, and bring in Tattletale.

=

“Mr. Pitter, we’ve gained another guest this evening. Please prepare the south room. File #219 will give you the details you need.”

=

More than satisfactory, indeed.

=

=

A/N: So I’ve got this story outlined, and a bit more written than what I’ve posted so far, but I’d like help brainstorming what Taylor would pull over the next few weeks/months. Keep in mind that it was only the hugely enduring popularity and strong personal connection with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings that let Taylor casually pull out insanely OP items like the Rings of Power. So, thoughts?


End file.
